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Game Development with Three.js
Game Development with Three.js

Game Development with Three.js: With Three.js you can create sophisticated 3D games that run in the web browser. This book is aimed at both the professional game designer and the enthusiast with a step by step approach including lots of tips and examples.

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Table of content icon View table of contents Preview book icon Preview Book

Game Development with Three.js

Chapter 2. Building a World

This chapter explains the components of a Three.js scene in detail, including the different kinds of renderers, geometries, materials, and lighting. We will also build a procedurally generated city.

Geometries


Geometries are instances of THREE.Geometry that define the shape of an object in a scene. They are made up of vertices and faces (which are themselves objects and are accessible through the vertices and faces array properties). Vertices are the THREE.Vector3 objects representing points in three-dimensional space, while faces are the THREE.Face3 objects representing triangular surfaces. (All more complex shapes are subdivided into triangular faces for rendering purposes.)

Luckily, dealing with vertices and faces directly is usually unnecessary because THREE.Geometry has many subclasses that help create commonly used shapes.

3D primitives

Three.js provides a number of classes that generate common shapes. The official documentation for each type is available at http://threejs.org/docs/, but a summary of common types is shown in the following table (some obscure, optional constructor parameters were omitted):

Type

Constructor

Description

Cube

THREE.CubeGeometry(width, height, depth...

Materials


Materials are instances of THREE.Material that define how objects appear. There are several common material subclasses:

Constructor

Explanation

MeshBasicMaterial

It is not affected by lighting (a characteristic called unlit), so this is usually used to display a solid color or a wireframe. Two adjacent, same-colored, unlit surfaces are difficult to tell apart.

MeshNormalMaterial

The red/green/blue values of the colors displayed by this material are based on the magnitude of the x/y/z values of the faces' normal vectors. (A normal vector is perpendicular to a surface.) This material is unlit and useful for quickly distinguishing the shape of an object.

MeshDepthMaterial

It is an unlit material that shows shades of gray, with brightness depending on the distance from the camera. It is useful when designing scenes before applying more realistic textures.

MeshLambertMaterial

Faces are affected by lighting, but are not shiny. Specifically, lighting is calculated per-vertex...

A city scene


We've covered a lot of ground with the Three.js API. Let's tie it all together with a project that uses what we've learned about geometry and materials.

So far, we've been working with a single object in our world. If we wanted to move it around, we'd have to change its position vector. We could create a full scene this way by adding multiple objects and manually positioning them. However, for worlds with more than a few objects, this can quickly get quite tedious. There are several alternatives:

  • Rectangular layout: This method involves storing a map in some simple format such as a string or an image, where each character or pixel color represents a type of object

  • Procedural generation: This method involves the use of an algorithm to position objects semi-randomly

  • Editor: This method involves the use of an external tool to construct the scene, followed by exporting the result (for example, in JSON format), and importing it when the application executes

The rectangular format is the...

Lighting


Lights are instances of THREE.Light that affect how the MeshLambertMaterial and MeshPhongMaterial surfaces are illuminated. Most lights have color (specified in hexadecimal notation like CSS colors) and intensity (a decimal value, usually between zero and one, indicating how bright the light should be). There are different kinds of lights as shown in the following table:

Type

Constructor

Description

Ambient

THREE.AmbientLight(color)

It affects all lit objects in the scene equally.

Directional

THREE.DirectionalLight(color, intensity = 1)

For this type, all light is parallel and comes from a given direction, as if the source was very far away.

Hemisphere

THREE.HemisphereLight(skyColor, groundColor, intensity = 1)

It simulates refractive lighting from the sun, sort of like two opposing directional lights.

Point

THREE.PointLight(color, intensity = 1, radius = 0)

It emanates from a specific point in space, like a lightbulb. It illuminates only objects within radius.

Spot

...

Renderers


Earlier, we switched from CanvasRenderer to WebGLRenderer in order to support shadows and fog. As a rule of thumb, WebGLRenderer is faster and has the most features, while CanvasRenderer has fewer features but broader browser support. One particularly nice feature of WebGLRenderer is that it supports antialiasing to smooth out jagged edges. We can enable this for our cityscape by passing the option in to the renderer constructor:

renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer({antialias: true});

With that, our cityscape is finally complete, as shown in the next screenshot:

A completed city

Three.js has several other renderers, most notably for CSS and SVG. These can be found in the examples/js/renderers folder and are available as THREE.CSS3DRenderer and THREE.SVGRenderer, respectively, if their eponymous files are included in your HTML document. These renderers have a smaller set of supported features and are not as widely used, so they are not included in the main library, but they can be useful...

Summary


In this chapter, we learned how to work with different kinds of geometry, materials, and lighting. We also learned about renderers and scenes, and completed a project to build a city procedurally. In the next chapter, we'll learn about ways that users can interact with Three.js, add some physics to the mix, and build a basic first-person shooter game.

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Key benefits

  • Develop immersive 3D games that anyone can play on the Internet
  • Learn Three.js from a gaming perspective, including everything you need to build beautiful and high-performance worlds
  • A step-by-step guide filled with game-focused examples and tips

Description

The advent of WebGL and its inclusion in many browsers enabled JavaScript programs running in a web browser to access the GPU without a plugin or extension. Three.js is a next generation high-level library that makes it possible to author complex 3D computer animations that display in the browser using nothing more than a simple text editor. The development of these new tools has opened up the world of real-time 3D computer animations to a far broader spectrum of developers. Starting with how to build 3D games on the web using the Three.js graphics library, you will learn how to build 3D worlds with meshes, lighting, user interaction, physics, and more. Along the way, you'll learn how to build great online games through fun examples. Use this book as a guide to embrace the next generation of game development! Moving on from the basics, you will learn how to use Three.js to build game worlds using its core components, including renderers, geometries, materials, lighting, cameras, and scenes. Following on from this, you will learn how to work with mouse and keyboard interactions, incorporate game physics, and import custom models and animations. You will also learn how to include effects like particles, sounds, and post-processing. You will start by building a 3D world, and then create a first person shooter game using it. You will then be shown how to imbue this FPS game with a “capture the flag” gameplay objective. With Game Development with Three.js, you will be able to build 3D games on the Web using the Three.js graphics library.

Who is this book for?

This book is for people interested in programming 3D games for the Web. Readers are expected to have basic knowledge of JavaScript syntax and a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. This book will be useful regardless of prior experience with game programming, whether you intend to build casual side projects or large-scale professional titles.

What you will learn

  • Set up a Three.js scene representing a game world
  • Understand the types of Three.js components, including geometries, materials, lighting, cameras, and renderers
  • Interact with your games using the mouse and keyboard
  • Structure your worlds with various approaches to physical collision
  • Construct complex levels using several different methods
  • Extend the Three.js framework with custom game-specific classes
  • Gain insight into development processes and important design and performance considerations for web games
  • Achieve a basic understanding of multiplayer game networking

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Publication date : Oct 24, 2013
Length: 118 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782168539
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Length: 118 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782168539
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Table of Contents

5 Chapters
Hello, Three.js Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a World Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Exploring and Interacting Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Adding Detail Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Design and Development Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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claudio daffra Jan 17, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
ti fornisce le basi , chiare per poter iniziare a districarsi nel labirinto del 3d. L'ho trovato piuttosto utile in quanto attraverso un esempio completo ti permette presto di ottenere risultati
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David McLure Jul 13, 2014
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Great summary of the technology! Works well as a follow-on book to the book named"Learning Three.js: The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL" by Jos Dirksen
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Game Reviews Nov 21, 2013
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This is an excellent book on 3D game programming for web browsers. It is a quick read (97 pages) and has many examples to help get you started. You also can download example code from an associated website so you can learn from the example code and get a head start. The book is well written and is an easy read. Somehow it also manages to cover an amazing range of complex topics including various methods of world generation, particle systems, 3D sound, optimization, networking/multiplayer, and even anticheating. Highly recommended!
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Kindle Customer Feb 04, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The author's book was extremely helpful! I'm now sold on using javascript with three.js for game development. I think this is going to be essential knowledge, but as of now it's cutting edge. Fun stuff.
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Maximilian Friedmann Feb 20, 2014
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Das Buch erklärt alles nötige in angenehmer Geschwindigkeit. Das erlernte Codebeispiel macht Lust auf mehr und bietet ebenfalls einen guten Start für eigene Projekte. Ist das Geld vollkommen wert!!!
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