Hobby 3D Game Programming with Three.js

Actually, not a lot - even none if that is the case!  This blog series is intended for the casual coder and the hobby game programmer.  Of course it helps if you have at least some experience in JavaScript or C, or any language really.  And you don't need to be a website developing guru because although this is a web development environment, the amount of actual HTML code that we will be doing is negligible.  We just need a simple web page shell or template to house the true game code running inside of it. And since the wonderful Three.js library is written in JavaScript, that will be the main language used.  If you've never used JavaScript before, don't worry: I've found that it is one of the most flexible, stripped-down languages out there.  In my programming travels I have used Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and JavaScript.  JavaScript was the easiest for me to get going with right away.  It doesn't have a lot of constraints and it's nice not t...

Here's a list of what you need to follow along with my series and run the examples that we will be making: Either a desktop, a laptop, or tablet for development (doesn't matter what operating system).  You could use a smartphone, but the smaller screen size makes it cumbersome for typing and editing code.  However, our finished examples and games WILL run on all devices, no matter what size or operating system, even phones! A Chrome browser.  Google is leading the way in cutting-edge technology for the modern web browser, and at the time of this writing, Chrome is the best choice to run our games and test our code. A text editor for typing in and editing HTML files and JavaScript files.  Every device comes with some kind of text editor.  There are more fancy ones out there like Sublime Text  , but there's really no need to install anything on your computer. A copy of the library Three.js (a JavaScript file) which is available for free from GitHub. ...

Today there are tons of resources available to the noob game developer.  From pre-made texture art, to 3D models, to physics engines, to full-blown game studio environments like Unity.  Although there are a lot of tools out there on the internet, it's difficult to narrow your search down to the essentials needed to get started.  Enter Web game development!  Just in the last few years, HTML5 web games have really taken off and the web platform is becoming a major contender in the graphics/game development world.  At first there was only Flash, and although there are some cool 2D Flash games out there, I wanted more - true 3D worlds in the browser.  Recently, WebGL has made its way into the spotlight as a tool to make the browser come to life with 3D graphics.  One of the premiere examples is  QuakeLive  , which runs Quake III Arena-style graphics in the browser. This was the first game that truly opened my eyes to the possibility o...

This might show my age, but I first got the desire to learn game programming back in the 80's as a young teen playing around with my Commodore 64.  I used to buy Compute! magazine with sample program listings inside and type hundreds of lines of Basic code into my C64, and save it to floppy disk (a REAL bendable floppy disk!).  As I laboriously copied the listings line by line, I had no idea what the code did, but the thought of controlling this machine and make it run games I had entered was just too good to pass up.  Then I typed RUN and hoped for the best.  Often what I got was a bunch of Syntax errors, but once in a while my C64 would come to life with graphics and sounds - I was hooked! Fast forward to the year 2000 and I discovered OpenGL.  I had fooled around in Basic before but to use OpenGL for Windows I needed to learn C and basic Windows development - both of which are no easy tasks.  I muscled through and actually (with the help of great books...