The whole game world/scene creation

[kurhlaa]

Hello,

This is more like a general question, but during the last years many things has changed, somewhere syntax, somewhere architecture. Blender has changed, babylon.js too. I would like to know what is a recommended workflow today (in 2017/2018 and future) for creation a complete and complex game scene - with all lights, shadows, camera, collisions, sounds, textures, locations, different meshes etc. ?

Lets say we don't use any physics plugins, because most important things are already built-in. Also the priority is a resulting performance.

Is it enough and efficient to use Blender only? I see in some examples people still do "ImportMesh" and then in a loop "meshes.forEach..." to configure imported meshes. Also some tutorials are too old because Blender has changed and I haven't found out how to enable babylon's camera-to-mesh collisions.

So.. your thoughts? Everything in Blender (other tool) or import meshes one by one and continue with a plain JavaScript?

[brianzinn]

I'm using Blender and BabylonJS for my game.  I think if your game is able to be done in Blender Game Engine that is a viable option.  I am not an expert in Blender and used it only to build 3d models with simple animations/uv maps and then call "ImportMesh".  I am much more comfortable writing code than fidgeting with Blender - so, I think it will depend also on the expertise of the people building the game.  I think a good workflow for BabylonJS is to get a starter kit using typescript/es6 with NPM and webpack.  I don't have any metrics for the resulting performance, but would imagine that using the Blender Game Engine would be harder to tweak performance as generated code seems harder to change.  I really try to avoid relying on generated code, so I have a strong bias.  I think on a Blender forum would give much different answers.  I also found the mix of tutorials for Blender for all the different versions to make it hard to work with - BabylonJS has good backwards compatibility through releases.

[GameMonetize]

Blender is pretty well supported so it is a good reason to use it

We did a lot of improvement on the 3dsmax one lately as well

[splash27]

By the way, can you advise me a good starter kit for BabylonJS with ES6, NPM and Webpack?

[brianzinn]

@splash27 - I'm not aware of any that specific.  One year ago I took a popular ES6 + Webpack Starter Kit (no longer maintained) that is reasonably unopionated and added BabylonJS 2.5, but it also has React.  When BabylonJS 3.1 comes out later this month I am planning to do an update (and mark my repo as deprecated):
https://github.com/brianzinn/react-redux-babylonjs-starter-kit
Probably the best thing to do is find a more generic starter kit and add BabylonJS yourself.  BabylonJS NPM is only on versions >= 3.1.0-alpha3.4.

To be honest if I was starting a new project then I would go with TypeScript

[GameMonetize]

Issue tracked here: https://github.com/BabylonJS/Documentation/issues/720