Going the Distance with BabylonJS
Have you ever been reading through the BJS docs and gotten stuck in the space between “Diving Deeper” section of material and how some technique or feature works in The Real World? Me too. So much so, in fact, that I, for reasons still poorly understood by all including myself, decided to write an entire book that would pave in and smooth over the quantized and discrete “Diving Deeper” content with a unified picture of an application.
For the past year and a half or so, I’ve been working on this, and I’ve really been excited to share with the BJS community. There’s just so much work that needs/is still needed to be done, and it’s never going to live up to my impossible standards, and that’s just one reason why it’s a good time to get this out into the open! Some folks are already aware of at least some of the machinations and rumblings going down with this project, and others may merely have suspected. Today however it’s finally time to bring everything out into the open with a good old fashioned 
Book Announcement!
Unlike many other books that are going to be published in the upcoming months, this one isn’t about things that happened months or years ago. It doesn’t contain first-hand depictions of momentous historic events that had never previously been shared and doesn’t contain any “scoops” on things that should’ve been made public long before. Something this book shares with those “other” sure-to-be-best-sellers is that it is definitely a book that everyone should be told about!
Going the Distance with BabylonJS is available now for pre-order at amazon
Through 14 chapters in three separate sections, the book will take readers on an end-to-end journey of building an entire application - a video game - from start to finish. Starting with a BJS refresher and ramp-up and continuing on from how to set up WebPack to handling input, managing state, writing shaders, and packaging into a Progressive Web App (among other topics). Although the Amazon listing currently lists a publication date in October, I can assure folks that it will most certainly be done before that time - I’m expecting a July or August Ed: ah, what sweet naïveté. Now looking at September for pub date at the latest date for its’ availability.
As a special treat - and I will not under any circumstances divulge what I had to do in order to make this happen - Going the Distance will contain special featurettes written by members and contributors of the BabylonJS community! @ericloftis will be writing about his real-time ray tracing journey, while build expert and overall ubermensch @ranaanweber is contributing material about contributing to BJS and building using the new build system in v5.0. Who else might be adding Words of Wisdom? You’ll have to stick around and pay attention to this space to find out!
Space-Truckers: The Video Game! is currently in a sort of final preview stage in preparation for this weeks’ hush hush thing hush hush. The game itself is Open-Sourced with the repository being available here with the intention of serving as a BabylonJS reference/full stack testing architecture - in addition to hopefully giving a smidge of enjoyable experiences.
That’s where you all come in! There are a whole swathe of GitHub issues in the Space-Truckers repository that are both awaiting creation and/or awaiting someone to come along and fix/build them. If you’ve been wanting to contribute to the BJS v5.0 launch event here’s your opportunity!
What a huge amount of work it must have been to go through all that.
