🔖 Available now to pre-order - new book on how-to BabylonJS! 🔖

[jelster]

Hey @gryff, thanks for the kind words and the thoughts.
in short, What @carolhmj said - this is a book aimed at everyone!

Slightly longer:
The content is segmented such that much of what folks as yourself might find intimidating has been tucked away into so-called “Extended Topics”, although there are a couple of equations in the sections on lighting and on the gravity physics simulations that might get your eyebrows to smoke a bit

P.S. - I feel the same when I look at my library of technical books and think about all the ones I’ve learned from over the years! I do like the feel of printed better, but man it’s tough to beat the convenience of digital… no more duffel bags stuffed with library books to bring on vacations

[gryff]

@jelster : It’s not the equations that bother me - I’ve dealt with magnetic resonance equations, even written a program from equations that predict the erosion of cliffs by the sea (a long time ago in Fortran with “punched cards” ).

My eyebrows “get singed” as BJS develops More and more functionality - some days I look at a forum topic and I’m not even sure I understand the question that is being asked! It is why “backwards compatibility” is so important to me.

Stay Safe jelstar, gryff

[jelster]

I feel you on the whole exercise of keeping up with the latest being exhausting - it’s the gripping hand of the joy and trauma that come in working in our biz!

I stand corrected from my earlier statement even as the statement itself stands true - this book is for you! It’s not intended to be a comprehensive ‘what’s new in v5’ but it does go into some of the new tooling, like the GUI Editor.

That has been one of the tougher decisions I’ve had to make over the course of this - which features in BJS to cover in the book and to what extent. Only so much room, and given my original page budget was 250-300, the current estimated page count of 406 or so goes beyond that by quite a bit!

[PolygonalSun]

Dude @jelster, this is really awesome to see it available and ready to pre-order! I am absolutely getting a copy.

[RaananW]

Already out of stock!

Ordered!

[jelster]

Lovely, thank you both! You got me there for a moment with the out of stock lol - it will show that way until the official availability date is known

[bghgary]

Just pre-ordered one. Let’s see how my son does with it.

[Mr_SquarePeg]

I am really looking forward to this. I am going to pick this up as soon as I get paid.

[jelster]

Thanks! I hope the book exceeds your expectations, or at least meets them

It’s reasons like that I use to remind myself when I just want to finish a section or chapter, but I know that it still needs more work.

It’s reasons like that which have caused the books publication date to go from June 2021 to (hopefully) July or August 2022 - and which also have fattened up the book from 250 - 400+ pages!

[mawa]

waiting on it… You should have printing 1M copies. Looks like People can’t wait to get it

[jelster]

Another milestone reached as of today, all the books’ primary content is now complete in at least draft form.

Essentially that means that the main body of the book, excluding the first and last chapters along with introductions and afterwords, is content complete!

Over the next upcoming few weeks, I’ll be coordinating with @PirateJC and other friends on going over each chapter and giving them a Technical Review for accuracy, clarity, and such.

Publication edges ever closer!

[jelster]

Update for the community on progress:

As of yesterday, the book has officially entered the revisions phase of production! Folks, things are really starting to move along here - I’ll hopefully have more news in the not-too-distance future!

[PirateJC]

[mawa]

After all, I think I’m going to just wait for this free copy yours will award me as one of the top five winners of the GUI Space Adventure Get your markers ready to sign my copy and watch me as I’m comin

[Deltakosh]

Fair

[jelster]

Indeed, that’s fair. Can’t wait to see your entry!

Fair warning, I’m not technically on the adjudication panel, so any bribes incentives sent in my direction may have little effect

[mawa]

@jelster

any bribes incentives sent in my direction may have little effect

Gosh Now I need to find a new strategy Not fair if you can’t even just cheat Don’t tell me I will have to make an effort for it?

[jelster]

Oh just try to imagine you’re Bill Bellicheck and you’re filming other teams’ practices, I’m sure you’ll figure something out!

[jelster]

Chapter List Reveal

Okay, so it’s not like this is Top Secret stuff, and it definitely wasn’t found in a box anywhere but this is one of the first times that many will have a chance to see the full chapter listing for Going the Distance!

Without further ceremony, here it is:

Chapter 1 The Space-Truckers Operation Manual, an overview of the world of Space-Truckers and of 3D development with Babylon.js

Chapter 2 Ramping up on Babylon.js, get started or refreshed with Babylon.js with a simple 3D animated scene

Chapter 3 Establishing the Development Workflow, putting into place a solid design-and-build time experience to allow rapid future development

Chapter 4 Creating the Application, building a stateful application that will host the game

Chapter 5 Adding a Cut Scene and Handling Input, imperatively creating an animated “cut scene” and learning how to handle user input of different types

Chapter 6 Implementing the Game Mechanics, start construction of the main route planning phase of the game. Augment the existing physics with orbital mechanics and simulated gravitational forces.

Chapter 7 Processing Route Data, add random encounter tables that correspond to a space-“biome”.

Chapter 8 Building the Driving Game, dynamically generate a route and allow players to drive it.

Chapter 9 Calculating and Displaying Scoring Results, with the help of the GUI Editor, capture and show stats on player performance in a reusable dialog

Chapter 10 Improving the Environment with Lighting and Materials, Improving the look and feel of the game by enhancing key visual elements.

Chapter 11 Scratching the Surface of Shaders, extended analogies explaining shaders and writing shader code that doesn’t involve writing any shader code.

Chapter 12 Measuring and Optimizing Performance, heuristics and approaches for testing the runtime performance and strategies for improvement along with dynamic runtime optimization with the SceneOptimizer.

Chapter 13 Converting the Application to a PWA, Prepare the application for installation as a Progressive Web Application. Publish to a major App Store and add support for offline usage.

Chapter 14 Extended Topics, Extended, AR/VR with WebXR and Babylon Native precede forays into photorealistic raytracing and Babylon.js in a CMS or eCommerce scenario.

chapter descriptions are pre-print and are subject to change

[jelster]

Exciting news!

The book is now in the publishers production phase in preparation for the eBook release next week! I’ll be posting updated info on both editions as they become more available.