from Hacker News

Babylon.js 4.2

by deltakosh on 11/12/20, 9:26 PM with 11 comments

  • by dang on 11/13/20, 9:01 PM

    Hey you guys, it's against the rules here to do promotional voting and commenting, and HN's software penalizes such posts. Best to avoid that, especially in case like this when the topic is likely to be interesting to the community—it will probably have the opposite effect to what you intend.

    I'm going to put this post in the second-chance queue [1] because, like I said, it seems like the community may find it interesting to discuss, and also the project hasn't had much discussion on HN for a few years. But please avoid this kind of thing in the future!

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

  • by gibs0ns on 11/14/20, 6:02 AM

    I discovered Babylon last year iirc and was impressed by demos, docs, and support by Microsoft so I figured I wanted to build something worthwhile in it to try it out.

    I decided to start developing a 3rd-person MMORPG using Babylon v4.0 as a side project, however after investing far too much time and getting it to a decent point, I came to question why I was bothering with a strictly web-based engine for a rather complex and extensive game. If I was going to go to the effort of creating this game, why not use some kind of game engine that can then export it to multiple platforms including web? So since then I've halted dev on the babylon version of the game, and begun porting to the Godot game engine, which can export to web among other platforms.

    With all that said, I still enjoyed my experience using Babylon, it was just the wrong tool for my chosen project.

    Babylon is a great choice for a lot of web based 3d content, but if you're intending to build any kind of significant game I'd recommend using a proper game engine from the start as it will enable you more flexibility in the long term.

    If however you do require a character controller for Babylon, I used babylonjs-charactercontroller [1] for my project and found it dynamic enough to work for most situations.

    [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/babylonjs-charactercontroller

  • by fatonR on 11/13/20, 10:27 PM

    Love the work, hate the forced storytelling. Cut the crap ffs

  • by randtrain34 on 11/13/20, 11:29 PM

    This has so many more capabilities than Three.js and the gap seems to be growing

  • by pjmlp on 11/13/20, 8:23 AM

    Love the work being done with BabylonJS, those guys rock, despite the limitations of the 3D Web APIs versus native ones their demos always surprise me in some fashion.

  • by emteycz on 11/14/20, 2:33 AM

    Babylon is awesome! I just started writing a game with it. The integration with TypeScript works well and there also are very fun things like React-BabylonJS - https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-babylonjs

  • by DannyB2 on 11/13/20, 10:24 PM

    I can't wait for Babylon.js 5.0

  • by kfarr on 11/13/20, 11:21 PM

    I'm still using A-Frame as my primary webxr project framework of choice but appreciate seeing these babylon updates. Gets me excited to try a small project on there soon.

  • by eatonphil on 11/14/20, 1:04 PM

    Is the soft shadows beer demo halfway down the page in the Hamburg train station?