Babylon 7.0 Is Out | Hacker News Reader

Babylon 7.0 Is Out

babylonjs.medium.com

62 pointsdeltakosh18 comments

Last time I tried Babylon even for something minimal my bundles (with esbuild) were just too big compared to alternatives.

I don’t see any mention of size optimizations in the blog post. Anyone have any knowledge on this they can share (else guess I’ll just try again with the new release).

It’s still quite monolithic. The issue is that it is a more complete engine than, let’s say Three, so the scene graph makes use of pretty much everything. Even you don’t use them, things like audio, webxr, node materials would get pulled in, despite tree shaking.

For our purposes, we filter out unused modules using webpack build. Things would crash badly if something would get used by accident, but we have a pretty controlled environment

What are the alternatives available currently?

You should not add inspector as dependency. This pulls in everything.

At Roll20 we just released a beta version of our new VTT engine which is powered by Babylon. The devs on the team have really enjoyed getting to use the modern workflow compared to the legacy decade-old stuff we were using before. Thanks Babylon devs!

I was a big fan of Babylon 5 so this is great news.

Same here. My first thought after reading the headline: "What!? They made Babylon 6 and I missed it?";)

I haven't even seen Babylon 5 yet...

I'm not complaining, but isn't this self-promotion? I'd love do something like it myself when I release my next app. I'd think that I would be attacked for doing it.

I don’t think there’s a problem with posting a link to your own blog. Just don’t only do that.

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

The OP seems to use HN mostly for promotion though

People post their own projects all the time. It's so popular there's even a "Show HN" convention.

You run into issues where you use it for things that should be traditional marketing.

The bing AI reference in the promo video is a bit misleading with the "3D rendered..." prompt while Babylon.js is I guess only used for the subtle waiting animations.

Congrats, team! Thank you for your hard work. I've used all the well-known libraries, and Babylon.js has the best performance for the web.

I'd love to learn more if you have any benchmarks or takeaways.

I used ThreeJS three years ago, but it was frequently introducing breaking changes, making it unsuitable for my game, especially since it's promoted as a rendering engine. Consequently, I created a mini-MMO-like game in PlayCanvas, which had too many bugs. With each new release, it seemed like they were breaking some features and introducing more bugs. Later, I tried Babylon.js, which had clean documentation and comprehensive examples for almost every topic. The Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) feature (https://doc.babylonjs.com/features/featuresDeepDive/animatio...) was particularly impressive; I was surprised they offered it in the first place. Additionally, the community is very responsive.

Discover the new features we added for Babylon.js (including global illumination, gerometry nodes and far more!)

Fantastic! Now, with Gaussian splat rendering!

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