Building an Immersive Game with A-Frame and Low Poly Models | Hacker News Reader

Building an Immersive Game with A-Frame and Low Poly Models

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76 pointslainon17 comments

I'm the original author. I'm happy to answer any questions.

I was wondering if it’s possible to use A-frame without the HTML stuff so to speak. Can I sort of just hand meshes and a camera position directly to A-frame? I am writing a video game currently in “fake” 3D with JS and Canvas and once I have the gameplay mechanics down I intend to rewrite it with WebGL and I was wondering if A-frame could then give me the ability to let people experience my game in VR.

I'm not 100% sure, but looking at the documentation, you can manually use/tweak the three.js objects underneath A-Frame. [1]

They seem to discourage it though, or, it seems like they'd rather you use the markup implementation.

[1] https://aframe.io/docs/0.8.0/introduction/javascript-events-...

Actually, on the contrary, we prefer A-Frame be used as a framework over three.js, and not trying to abstract it. It's sort of a way to organize/encapsulate three.js code as a declarative ECS framework.

Yeah, document.querySelector('a-scene').scene provides you the three.js scene, you can dump whatever you want in there.

The HTML stuff mainly abstracts Three.js objects for faster development and better composition. Since Three.js is already an abstraction of WebGL you may have more luck with it by making a threejs plugin that "hand meshes and a camera position" to the Three.js scene/geometries.

But honestly my experience on this subject is that it would be much more manageable and productive to make the game directly with A-Frame or at least with threejs. If you need a particuliar behaviour you can go down from A-Frame to threejs and from threejs to WebGL and build the relevant components/plugins.

I’m a complete novice in the game development space so I hope this isn’t a dumb question - how feasible is it to create an MMO or sandbox game/world with A-Frame?

If you're a complete novice then an MMO is not feasible, for any value of 'MMO' that you're probably imagining. It generally takes a AAA team with upwards of 100 members (coders, artists, designers, etc.) to even fail at making an MMO, let alone succeed.

Of course there are a couple of notable exceptions, the two that spring to mind are Wyvern ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern_(video_game) ) and Eternal Lands ( https://eternal-lands.blogspot.com.au/ ) I can't think of any other solo or small-team-hobbyist attempts to create an MMO that even got as far as releasing something.

Feasibility depends on your resources, due date, and expectations.

It would probably make sense to prototype your game idea first, maybe as a board game, Doungeons & Dragons style game, or as a choose your own adventure story. If it seems fun, start to migrate it into software. I don't have the reference, but I've read the creator of Mario starts with a key game mechanic (like Mario's jump) and tests it without character art to see if it's fun (for example, black & white rectangles instead of Mario and a turtle).

Another example: Nintendo prototyped & play tested key game mechanics of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2D NES style. https://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14780954/the-legend-of-zeld...

Cool demo! I liked the little character model a lot. Thanks for taking the time to write this!

Is it hard to tweak the lighting model in A-Frame? I like the accessibility the library brings, and I know you were going for a particular lowpoly look, but often I find that a lot of the default lowpoly stuff tends to look a bit same-y. Or, the article encourages immersion, and I'm curious how I could achieve different lighting/shading effects to give a unique look, especially with lowpoly. I've noticed a lot of the A-Frame website examples look quite similar to the sort of default Unity3D lighting that comes out of the box.

Tweaking lighting technically is easy. To find the right values is a bit more subjective. A-Frame uses sort of phong with PBR capabilities, but the PBR pieces aren't used often.

You can use different shaders, tweak the materials, bake the lighting, use shadows. Pretty much the same tweaking as you'd do in any game.

A-Frame is incredible, it is both powerful and flexible thanks to its component system. You can start a simple project and as complexity goes up you can quite easily put React or Vue in the equation since it is all HTML.

React + A-Frame is my favorite game/3D programming experience and thanks to A-Frame we will see many 3D web apps. Last year I prototyped a Facebook/Youtube browser with it and right now I am working on something bigger with those tools and I absolutely do not feel limited by them.

If you are interested by the idea of a 3D web you should definitely try A-Frame !

We software people roll our eyes at marketing's appropriation of our terminology. I wonder if builders and engineers roll their eyes at ours? (jk. The A in A-Frame has a different root.)

They do, however one of the funnier responses is from my brother in the military when I talk about 'deployments'..

The entire population of California is rolling their eyes when a developer uses "roll your own".

And don't get me started on actual developers and engineers.

Nice article Josh! I'm one of the co-creators and current maintainers of A-Frame. Let me know if you have questions as well!

We're currently part of the YC batch as Supermedium, we built an entire VR browser using A-Frame. http://store.steampowered.com/app/803010/Supermedium/

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