How to correctly import modules in Typescript node headless environment

Questions
1

I am currently continuing our long-running game project and now the need for a post-processor of babylon files as part of the build pipeline is overwhelming. Loading files from the server and then changing half the stuff again on the client is just stupid. I have expressed my thoughts on this in another thread already:

So I decided to be a good sport and build a generalized and open-source solution that others can use as well. Maybe this could even become part of the babylon project itself some day (if you are interested), so I wanted to do it in Typescript (and also just to finally learn it). My approach will be to have a node app that creates a NullEngine, do all the post-processing (for example substituting materials, applying optimizations) there and export the file as babylon again.

So as a TypeScript n00b I just googled and googled until I found solutions to every issue. But this one leaves me stumped now. I get the following message:

TSError: ⨯ Unable to compile TypeScript:
src/index.ts:6:8 - error TS2307: Cannot find module '@babylonjs/core/Engines/nullEngine'.

6 } from "@babylonjs/core/Engines/nullEngine";
         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    [... long stacktrace]

[nodemon] app crashed - waiting for file changes before starting...

The repo is here:

And yeah, there is basically no code, just the import. The first roadblock to solve before starting to code.

On npm start you should get the same message. Is this a misconfiguration issue? Or do I need an additional npm package? The @types package for babylonjs is ancient and deprecated, so that can’t be it, and ts-loader is only for webpack right?

Thanks in advance to the TypeScript pros! Escaping JavaScripts truly weird typing rules is probably worth a little config work :wink:

BTW the reason we need this is we are modelling all of our creatures now and a lot of them have fur, which the blender exporter doesn’t/can’t support. So we’d have to check for a special material name on the client every time and apply the right fur material (possibly a ShaderMaterial, possibly a NodeMaterial, possibly a FurMaterial) for the creature after it’s already loaded. That’s just dumb. So I want to do things like that in the build phase. I imagine I am not the only one with this type of need. Or maybe I am, but anyway I’m putting it out there…

2

I’m by no mean expert in typescript configuration, but it seems adding "moduleResolution": "node" in the tsconfig.json file make it work.

3 Likes
3

That was it. I had tried that for another error but there was a different issue obscuring it, so removed it again. It never occurred to me that TypeScript does resolution that differently by default.

Thanks!

4

Ohhhhh yes, by default they do not look in node_modules folder: Module Resolution · TypeScript

1 Like