Let’s Program A 3D Browser Game Part 6: Forward To Tomorrow!

Last time we improved our engine to let us make nice clean 90 degree turns, a definite requirement of any proper dungeon crawler. The next logical step is to let us also move forward in whatever direction we happen to be facing so that we can actually explore our 3D maze instead of just admiring it from one spot.

The logic for moving forward is very similar for the logic of making a 90 degree turn.

  1. Wait for the user to press the up key
  2. Enter a “moving” state that blocks new player input
  3. For every frame spent moving move the player a small distance in the direction they are facing
  4. Once the user has moved an entire dungeon square distance reset their state and wait for the next key press

The only tricky bit here is keeping track of which direction the player needs to move in. With turning we could always just add (or subtract) 90 degrees from our current position and trust things would work out fine. But with movement sometimes we will need to add to the player’s x position and sometimes to their z position.

Obviously we need some way to keep track of which axis the player should move along when they press the move key. While we could technically calculate this information based off of the player’s current degree of rotation I think it makes for easier and cleaner code to just explicitly keep track of whether the player is facing north, east, south or west. And of course that means we’re going to need new constants and a new player variable.

const NORTH = 100;
const EAST = 101;
const WEST = 102;
const SOUTH = 103;

var direction = NORTH;

And then to keep track of our actual movement we’re going to need a few more:

const MOVING_FORWARD = 4;

var walkDistance = 0;
var startX = 0;
var startZ = 0;

Now let’s put those to work, first by updating our turning code to also properly update the direction the player is facing. Because the player is locked into a full turn as soon as they press the key we might as well do things the easy way and update their direction as soon as they press left or right; no need to wait until the end of the turn. So find the if statements inside of the waiting state and add to them like so:

if(playerInput.left){
   state = TURNING_LEFT;
   switch(direction){
      case NORTH:
         direction = WEST;
         break;
      case EAST:
         direction = NORTH;
         break;
      case SOUTH:
         direction = EAST;
         break;
      case WEST:
         direction = SOUTH;
         break;
   }
}
else if(playerInput.right){
   state = TURNING_RIGHT;
   switch(direction){
      case NORTH:
         direction = EAST;
         break;
      case EAST:
         direction = SOUTH;
         break;
      case SOUTH:
         direction = WEST;
         break;
      case WEST:
         direction = NORTH;
         break;
   }
 }

Now that we know what direction the player is facing we can safely move them forward. To start let’s add some detection code for the up key inside of our waiting state block. This else if should go immediately after the playerInput.right else if we just updated:

else if(playerInput.up){
   walkingDistance = 0;
   startX = camera.position.x;
   startZ = camera.position.z;
   state = MOVING_FORWARD;
}

Pretty simple. If the player presses the up button we put them in the MOVING_FORWARD state and initialize the data we need to make the move succeed. In particular we need to mark down where the player is currently standing in startX and startZ. We also reset the walkingDistance variable to 0 since we’re going to need to use that data to figure out when we should stop moving.

Of course, being in the MOVING_FORWARD state doesn’t do us any good unless there is code for it. So make some space at the end of your render function, right before the recursive call to render, and add this:

if(state == MOVING_FORWARD)
{
   walkingDistance += 1 /30;

   if(walkingDistance >= 1){
      walkingDistance = 1;
      state = WAITING;
   }

   switch(direction){
      case NORTH:
         camera.position.z = startZ - walkingDistance;
         break;
      case EAST:
         camera.position.x = startX + walkingDistance;
         break;
      case SOUTH:
         camera.position.z = startZ + walkingDistance;
         break;
      case WEST:
         camera.position.x = startX - walkingDistance;
         break;
   }
}

This logic should look familiar since it’s just our 90 degree turn code straightened into a line.

Basically for every frame we spend MOVING_FORWARD we extend our walking distance by a fraction of a square length (which for us is 1). We then look at our current direction to figure out which way we need to move and update the camera to a new position based off our starting location and the distance we have moved so far. As walkingDistance increases the camera gets moved farther and farther from where it started.

When walking distance exceeds 1 whole unit we force it back to a perfect 1 and reset our state to waiting for input. By not including a return statement we also get to have one final round of camera updates based off of the perfect 1 which should properly place the camera at the desired end point, ready for any future turns or moves. This is important because missing our target by even a tiny fraction can add up over the course of several hundred moves and leave the camera in the completely wrong place.

If everything went well you can now load your code and walk around our tiny three square maze. Of course, the lack of any sort of collision detection also means you can ghost through the walls and walk right out of the maze but solving that is a problem for another day.

Still, we have a little bit of time left over so let’s make a quick improvement to the code.

At the moment our turn and move code both move the player a set amount per frame. This is an OK approach, especially since the requestAnimationFrame function we’re using does its best to maintain a constant 60 or so frames per second.

But that frame rate is not guaranteed! If your game is really complicated or the user has too many tabs open that frame rate can start to drop and a quick turn that was supposed to take a single second can drag on and on and on.

Alternatively changes in computer technology might lead to a much higher frame rate and suddenly that carefully planned one second turn flashes by in half that time.

Even pro games have issues like this. For example, Dark Souls 2 originally ran at 30 frames per second and calculated weapon durability based on that fact. When it got ported to a new generation of faster machines they boosted the frame rate to 60 and suddenly all the weapons were breaking half twice as fast. Woops.

The solution to these problems is to, whenever possible, base game calculations not off of frames but off of actual time passed. That way you can program game events to take exactly one second regardless of whether that second lasts for thirty frames or three frames or three hundred frames.

First off we’re going to need a variable to keep track of what time it is. Let’s toss it up by the rest of our contsants and global variables:

var last_update = Date.now();

It’s default value is whatever time it is when the program gets initialized.

Now near the top of our render function we can add:

var now = Date.now();

var deltaTime = now - last_update;
last_update = now;

These three lines get the current time and compare it to our last stored time in order to figure out how long our last frame lasted. We then reset our update time so we can start counting our next frame.

Now if we want to turn once per second we can:

turningArc += Math.PI/2 * deltaTime/1000;

And if we want to walk forward one square in one second:

walkingDistance += 1 * deltaTime/1000;

We are now frame-rate independent!

Let’s Program A 3D Browser Game Part 5: Before You Can Learn To Walk You Must Learn To Dungeon Crawl

If we want to actually control our dungeon experience of just spinning around in automated circles the first thing we’re going to need is a way to get user input. Fortunately we already know how to do that in javascript.

For those of you who don’t feel like reading the linked article we basically create a global javascript object that stores what buttons are currently being pushed. We then create a pair of functions, one designed to keep track of keys being pushed and one to keep track of keys being released. Finally we link those two functions to the webpages natural keyDown and keyUp events.

In other words, put this somewhere convenient, like at the top of your script before the runMaze function:

var playerInput = new Object();

function doKeyDown(event){
   var keynum;

   if(window.event){ //Browser is IE
      keynum = event.keyCode;
   }
   else{
      keynum = event.which;
   }

   if(keynum == 37){
      playerInput.left = 1;
   }
   else if(keynum == 38){
      playerInput.up = 1;
   }
   else if(keynum == 39){
      playerInput.right = 1;
   }
   else if(keynum == 40){
      playerInput.down = 1;
   }
}

function doKeyUp(event){
   var keynum;
   
   if(window.event){ //Browser is IE
      keynum = event.keyCode;
   }
   else{
      keynum = event.which;
   }

   if(keynum == 37){
      playerInput.left = 0;
   }
   else if(keynum == 38){
      playerInput.up = 0;
   }
   else if(keynum == 39){
      playerInput.right = 0;
   }
   else if(keynum == 40){
      playerInput.down = 0;
   }
}

Then be sure to update your body definition like so:

<body onload="runMaze();" onkeydown="doKeyDown(event);" onkeyup="doKeyUp(event);">

And voila! We can now track the arrow keys. Let’s see if we can do anything cool with that.

For instance, what if we were to wrap our automatic camera rotation code inside of an if statement?

var render = function () {
   requestAnimationFrame( render );

   if(playerInput.left){
      camera.rotation.y += 0.01;
   }
   else if(playerInput.right){
      camera.rotation.y -= 0.01;
   }

   renderer.render(scene, camera);
};

And now we can spin the camera IN BOTH DIRECTIONS by holding down the left and right arrows.

Wrong Genre?

Of course, if you’ve played a dungeon crawler before you might notice that something here doesn’t feel quite right. Specifically, we shouldn’t be able to turn just a few degrees at a time. It’s much more traditional to lock the player to the four cardinal directions and force them to slowly rotate through a full 90 degrees on each keypress.

Ironically limiting the player’s control like this is actually going to be harder than just letting them do whatever they want. No more directly reacting to button presses on each frame. Instead we need a multi-step workflow like this:

1) Put the player into a TURNING state that blocks new input

2) While TURNING rotate the player a few degrees per frame

3) When the player has turned a full 90 degrees remove the TURNING state and wait for more input

That means we’re going to need some constants (which Javascript finally sort-of supports) to list out our possible states and a variable for keeping track of which state the player is currently in.

const WAITING = 1;
const TURNING_RIGHT = 2;
const TURNING_LEFT = 3;

var state = WAITING;

We’re also going to want to keep track of which way the camera is currently pointing as well as how far the player has already turned.

var currentDirection = 0;
var turningArc = 0;

With all that we can now setup our loop to start managing state for us by putting this in our render function.

if(state == WAITING){
   if(playerInput.left){
      state = TURNING_LEFT;
   }
   else if(playerInput.right){
      state = TURNING_RIGHT;
   }
}

And now we can use that state to slowly (over the course of 60 frames) move the player through a 90 degree (half PI radian) arc by getting rid of our old turning code and replacing it with something like this:

if(state == TURNING_LEFT){
   turningArc += Math.PI/2 / 60;
   if(turningArc >= Math.PI/2){
      turningArc = Math.PI/2;
      currentDirection = currentDirection + turningArc;
      turningArc = 0;
      state = WAITING;
   }
   
   camera.rotation.y = currentDirection + turningArc;
}

if(state == TURNING_RIGHT){
   turningArc += Math.PI/2 / 60;
   if(turningArc >= Math.PI/2){
      turningArc = Math.PI/2;
      currentDirection = currentDirection - turningArc;
      turningArc = 0;
      state = WAITING;
   }

   camera.rotation.y = currentDirection - turningArc;
}

Now when we are TURNING_LEFT (or RIGHT) we start each frame by adding one 60th of a turn to our turningArc. We then adjust the camera by setting its y rotation to the combination of our turningArc to our currentDirection. So if the player is facing north (0 radians) and has turned 30 degrees the camera will point North-North East.

We also check whether or not we’ve turned a full 90 degrees. When we have that means the turn is finished and several things happen:

1) We set our turningArc to exactly 90 degrees to avoid overshooting out goal. We don’t want the player accidentally turning 91 degrees or eventually they’ll be pointing in the completely wrong direction.

2) We update our currentDirection to reflect the completed turn.

3) We reset the turningArc so it’s ready for our next turn

4) We change the state to waiting so the game will accept input again

Really the only strange thing here is the fact that we have to ADD turning angles when turning left and SUBTRACT them when turning right, which seems backwards. This is just because of the orientation of the default y axis of our engine. If you really cared I’m sure you can swap it around by turning the game’s main camera completely upside down before moving the player or building any walls but I’m just going to live with it.

Time To Move On

We have a nice basic framework for turning around now, but it’s hard to call this a dungeon crawler while the player is stuck in just one place. The next obvious step is to add some actual movement through some code pretty similar to what we just wrote. Sadly there’s no quite enough room to include that all right here so I guess I’ll see you next time!

Let’s Program A 3D Browser Game Part 4: A Different Kind Of Software Architect

We’ve seen how to use three.js to manually create and position walls within our labyrinth. But building a full size maze by hand would be be boring, easy to mess up and hard to maintain.

Let’s not do that.

Instead let’s write a bunch of helper code to do the heavy lifting for us.

For starters I’d like a function to help put walls in the right place, a function that would let us forget about doing math and instead just say something like “I want a north wall at maze location <3, 5>”.

Not a particularly hard thing to write either. First we calculate the center point of the maze location we want to put the wall at. Since all of our walls are a convenient 1 unit wide that’s as simple as directly assigning our maze coordinates to our wall coordinates. The only trick here is that by default in 3D space the y axis points straight up so what we call the “y coordinate” in 2D space is actually the  “z coordinate” in 3D space. (Well… unless you want to rotate the camera around a bunch but let’s not bother with that).

Once we have the x and z coordinates of the center of our maze location we next have to check whether the wall is supposed to be to the north, east, south or west. We then rotate the wall and push it half a unit away from the center. Be sure to double check this step; it’s pretty easy to accidentally mix things up so that east walls wind up getting pushed to the west or get rotated backwards and basically disappear (since walls are one-sided).

function placeWall(x,y,direction){
   var wall = new THREE.Mesh( wallGeometry, wallMaterial );
   wall.position.z = y;
   wall.position.x = x;

   if(direction == 'n'){
      wall.position.z -= 0.5;
   }
   else if(direction == 'e'){
      wall.position.x += 0.5;
      wall.rotation.y = -Math.PI/2;
   }
   else if(direction == 's'){
      wall.position.z += 0.5;
      wall.rotation.y = Math.PI;
   }
   else if(direction == 'w'){
      wall.position.x -= 0.5;
      wall.rotation.y = Math.PI/2;
   }
   else{
      return false;
   }

   scene.add(wall);
}

Now we can replace all of our wall positioning code with:

placeWall(0,0,'n');
placeWall(0,0,'e');
placeWall(0,0,'w');
placeWall(0,0,'s');

And everything looks the same as before.

Which is boring. Replace that with this:

placeWall(0,0,'n');
placeWall(0,0,'w');
placeWall(0,0,'s');
placeWall(1,0,'n');
placeWall(1,0,'e');
placeWall(1,0,'s');

And now we get a hallway that’s twice as wide as our original square room.

If only remodeling in real life was so easy…

I Thought You Had The Map…

Our new helper function makes it almost impossible to mess up when placing a wall. But there’s still a couple problems:

1) It’s kind of hard to remember where we have and haven’t placed walls

2) For an interactive maze it’s not enough to just place the walls, we need to keep track of where they are for later navigation.

So what we really need is a way to describe our entire maze all at once and all in one place. We can then use that maze data to build the 3D graphics and then also use it later on for keeping track of where the player is in the maze and how they can and can’t move.

So what is the most convenient way to define our high level maze data?

Well… a maze is fundamentally just a grid of connected cells that may or may not have walls between them. So we can think of a maze as a two dimensional array of cell objects and we can define a cell object as a set of four wall values that are either “true” (there is a wall) or “false” (there is no wall).

Now since a cell has 4 walls it basically contains 4 bits of information. This means we could define each cell as a single 4-bit super-short integer and then use bitwise logic to calculate…

JUST KIDDING!

Modern computers have billions of bytes of memory. Since our program is unlikely to ever have more than a few hundred cells there is absolutely no need to obsess about jamming as much information into as few bits as possible. Instead we can write our code in a way that’s easy for us humans to understand and work with.

Something like this:

function MazeCell(northWall, eastWall, southWall, westWall){
   this.northWall = northWall;
   this.eastWall = eastWall;
   this.southWall = southWall;
   this.westWall = westWall;
}

Then we can define new cells in our labyrinth as easily as:

var cell = new MazeCell(true, true, false, true);

Of course, we don’t want our cells just hanging out in random variables. We want them to be part of a nice big grid array, something more like this:

var mazeGrid = [Array(2), Array(2)];
mazeGrid[0][0] = new MazeCell(true, false, false, true);
mazeGrid[0][1] = new MazeCell(true, true, true, false);
mazeGrid[1][0] = new MazeCell(false, true, true, true);
mazeGrid[1][1] = new MazeCell(false,false,false,false);

Which works out to be a simple ‘L” shaped room. (That’s why the last room has no walls, it’s completely blocked off from the rest of the maze and doesn’t really matter because it can’t be seen.)

Bringing It All Together

Now we have some maze data AND a function that can accurately drop walls down wherever we want. Mix them together and we can build an entire maze!

All we need is a nested foreach loop. The first loop will grab the rows from the maze. Then for each row we’ll have a second loop that grabs each individual cell and builds whatever walls it needs.

mazeGrid.forEach(function(mazeRow, rowCount){
   mazeRow.forEach(function(mazeCell, colCount){
      if(mazeCell.northWall)
         placeWall(colCount, rowCount, 'n');
      if(mazeCell.eastWall)
         placeWall(colCount, rowCount, 'e');
      if(mazeCell.southWall)
         placeWall(colCount, rowCount, 's');
      if(mazeCell.westWall)
         placeWall(colCount, rowCount, 'w');
   });
});

And now we can use our automatically rotating camera to see the shape of our little “L” shaped room.

OK… but where are we going to find a carpet that shape?

Of course there’s a limit to how much use we can get out of an automatically rotating camera. If the maze gets even a little bit bigger we wont be able to see the whole thing from our starting point at <0, 0>. If only we could control the camera, maybe walk around the maze like an actual dungeon crawler.

Hey! I’ve got a great idea for the next update!

Let’s Program A 3D Browser Game Part 3: Feeling Boxed In

Last time we started our adventure into building a 3D labyrinth by putting up a single wall, and while that was pretty neat the truth is it barely qualifies as a road block, much less a maze.

So let’s pop up another three walls and at least make ourselves a room.

Since all of our walls are the exact same shape and color (for now, at least) we can save on both code and memory by reusing the same geometry and material again and again. (Note: pro games do this too. If there are 100 identical orcs on the screen odds are good they’re all being drawn based off a single in-memory model).

While all of our walls will be sharing the same 3D data they will still have their own unique position data, which should make sense since we want all all the walls to be in difference places.

For example, let’s put a wall to the left of our camera (which lives at position <0,0,0>). To put a wall to the left of of the camera’s position we need to leave the z and y coordinates alone but set the x position to -0.5. We will then also need to twist the wall 90 degrees so that it sits at a right angle with our other wall. Well, I say 90 degrees but three.js uses radians so make that half a Pi instead. Translated into code:

var wall2 = new THREE.Mesh( wallGeometry, wallMaterial)
 wall2.position.x = -0.5;
 wall2.rotation.y = Math.PI/2;
 scene.add( wall2 );

The only trick here is making sure you twist the wall in the right direction. Since we are using a one sided material twisting the wall in the other direction would leave us looking at the wrong direction and make it invisible.

Load the page now and you should notice that the tiny bit of black you used to be able to see to the empty left of our wall has disappeared. That’s because there is now a left wall attached to it.

Now let’s add another wall to the right and one right behind the camera.

var wall3 = new THREE.Mesh( wallGeometry, wallMaterial)
 wall3.position.x = 0.5;
 wall3.rotation.y = -Math.PI/2;
 scene.add( wall3 );
 
 var wall4 = new THREE.Mesh( wallGeometry, wallMaterial)
 wall4.position.z = 0.5;
 wall4.rotation.y = Math.PI;
 scene.add( wall4 );

Now the white rectangle should go all the way from the left side of the screen to the right. But how do we make sure that the wall behind the camera was properly placed?

Easiest way is to add a little code to the render loop to make the camera spin so we can see all four walls of the room.

var render = function () {
   requestAnimationFrame( render );

   camera.rotation.y += 0.01;

   renderer.render(scene, camera);
};

Run the code now and you should look like you’re lazily spinning around in an office chair stuck in the middle of a room with pure white walls.

Although to be honest since the walls are pure white you might find that the whole thing looks more like one big white rectangle that keeps bulging and shrinking. There’s no strong sense of depth so it’s pretty easy to see the scene as a 2D animation instead of a 3D one.

Let’s fix this by adding some lighting. Lights and shadows will give the scene a strong sense of 3D.

But first we need to upgrade our material. The BasicMaterial we were using ignores lights and always looks the same no matter how bright or dark the scene is. So go find the line where we defined our material and change it to this:

var wallMaterial = new THREE.MeshStandardMaterial( );

This new wall material actually has a lighting system, which you can check this by reloading the code. Notice how the whole screen is suddenly pitch black? That’s because we don’t have any lights yet and standard materials can’t be seen without them.

So let’s give ourselves a light. Specifically we’ll be setting up a point light in the center of the room. A point light is basically a glowing point the shines equally in all directions, making it a great way to simulate light bulbs, torches and lanterns.

We can create a basic point light up by adding this code after our walls but before our rendering code:

var playerPointLight = new THREE.PointLight();
playerPointLight.position.set( 0, 0, 0 );
scene.add( playerPointLight );

Now run your code again. The point lighting should make the distant corners of the room much darker than the nearby centers of each wall, helping to improve the illusion that viewer is looking at a 3D space.

Monochromatic games are artsy and profound, right?

Cool! Technically we now know enough to build an entire maze. But let’s be honest, manually creating and positioning dozens or hundreds of walls sounds uper boring. So next time we’ll be building some utility code that will simplify maze building.

Let’s Program A 3D Browser Game Part 2: Three.js To The Rescue

Sorry For The Delay

My original plan was to show how to program a 3D web application from scratch, but after several rewrites I’ve come to the conclusion I can’t really do that without spending weeks worth of posts talking about general 3D programming. If that’s what you really want I suggest hitting this tutorial. Please note that none of their sample code will work unless you also download the helper libraries they provide in the online code repository. Just copy pasting their examples will fail without them.

As for me, I’m going to use a third party library to help us jump right into web based 3D without having to mess around too much with linear algebra and view frustums, which are all quite interesting but a bit too deep for the casual and fun game programming series I wanted to write here.

The particular library we’ll be using is called “three.js”, which can be downloaded at threejs.org. They also have plenty of documentation and examples there so if you find you enjoy the little application we’re writing here you’ll know where to go next to learn some more advanced tricks.

Let’s Get To Work

Go ahead and download three.js and grab the relatively small “three.min.js” file it comes with. Unless you’re planning on editing the library itself (and we aren’t) that’s all you really need so toss a copy of it into a new folder called something like “3dwebmaze” and create a blank “index.html” file right next to it. Now pop open your index in your favorite text editor and get ready for some coding.

First things first: we need to set up the basic webpage where all of our cool 3D stuff is going to happen. Our main requirements are to set up a canvas, make sure we load the three.js library and then tell the body of the webpage to trigger a script after it finishes loading. The script we want it to trigger will, of course, be the 3d maze program we’re going to write.

<html>
<head>
   <title>Maze With three.js</title>
   <script src="three.min.js"></script>
   <script>
      function runMaze()
      {
      }
   </script>
</head>
<body>
<body onload="runMaze();">
   <canvas id="mazeCanvas" width=600 height=450 />
</body>
</html>

With the boring stuff out of the way we can start writing some real code and filling in our runMaze function. Please note that every line of code in this particular post needs to go inside of runMaze.

The first thing runMaze needs to do is grab a reference to our canvas. Not only do we need to tell three.js where to find its drawing target, we also need to be able to grab the canvas’s width and height in order to fine tune various bits of our rendering process.

var mazeCanvas = document.getElementById("mazeCanvas");

After that we need to set up three js itself. First up is a “scene” whose job is to keep track of all the objects we want to draw. Just creating a 3D shape isn’t enough, you have to add it to the scene for anything to happen.

var scene = new THREE.Scene();

Next we need to set up the renderer, which does all the work of actually drawing things. By default the renderer will try to create a brand new canvas but if you already have one you can pass a reference to it. Notice that we’re passing WebGLRenderer an anonymous object with a “canvas” property. Just passing the canvas reference alone won’t work; this function, like a lot of three.js, expects an object full of setup details instead of direct arguments.

var renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer({ canvas: mazeCanvas });

The last thing we need is a camera, which helps the renderer figure out exactly how things should be drawn to the screen. The camera needs four pieces of information to work properly, so buckle yourself in for a wall o’ text.

The first camera argument is “field of view”, which is kind of a weird idea. Think of it like this: humans and cameras see the world through a cone shape. Up close you can only see things right in front of you (like a single tree) but the farther away things are the wider an area you can see all at once (like miles of distant forest). Well field of view is just a measurement of what kind of vision cone you want your camera to have. Will it be a big wide panoramic camera or will it be more focused? The “best” cone shape depends heavily on what kind of scene you want to draw. For now we’ll choose a cone with a 75 degree angle and then tweak it later if we think that’s too wide / not wide enough.

The second piece of camera information is aspect ratio, or the shape of the final picture. This needs to match whatever you canvas size is or else things will get stretched and squished just like when you accidentally try to watch an old movie on a widescreen TV. The easiest way to make sure it’s right is to just calculate the aspect ratio on the spot based on the same canvas reference we passed to the renderer. That way if we later decide to change the size of the canvas the code here will automatically update the next time we reload the page.

The last two pieces of information are the minimum and maximum distances you want objects to appear at, commonly called the near and far plane of the view frustum. Anything closer to you than the near limit gets ignored (useful for making sure you don’t draw things behind or overlapping with your camera). Anything beyond the far limit also gets ignored (useful for making sure you don’t waste processing power drawing objects so far away they would barely be a blip on the screen anyways). Once again the exact values for these depend on what kind of scene you’re programming so for now we’ll just use the default values from the three.js online tutorial and then change them later if that doesn’t work.

Put those four pieces of information all together and we get this:

var camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera( 75, mazeCanvas.width/mazeCanvas.height, 0.1, 1000 );

With that three.js is all set up and ready for us to start building mazes.

I think it’s safe to say that the most important part of a maze is the walls. You can get away with leaving off the ceiling and people usually don’t look too closely at the floor but without walls it’s not a maze at all. So let’s draw some walls.

In general the easiest way to draw a wall is to just make a 2D rectangle and stick it the way of the player, and after a little experimentation I found that a wall twice as wide as it is tall seems to look the best. But exactly how tall should it be?

If this was a real life maze we’d probably base the height of our maze walls off of the average height of the people we want to explore it. Example: Almost all humans (at the time of this writing) are less than seven feet tall so an eight foot high wall should be enough to prevent anybody from bumping their head.

But this isn’t a physical maze. It’s a 3D graphics maze and the imaginary cameraman running through the maze is exactly 0 units tall and has no head to bump. That means that exact size of our walls doesn’t actually matter. We could make our walls HUGE and still get them to fit on screen by just putting them far away. We could also make them super tiny but still have them feel taller than the player by just putting them close together and right in the front of the camera. What matters isn’t the size of the wall, but the ratio of its size and camera distance.

This is nice because it means we can set the scale of our maze to whatever is most convenient to work with and then adjust the camera until everything looks appropriately player sized.

Now it seems to me that the most convenient scale for a grid based maze is to let every grid square be one unit wide and one unit long. That way we can easily convert between maze locations (column 5, row 3) and 3D positions (x:5, z:3). And of course if the grid squares are one unit wide every wall will also be 1 unit wide and to get the proper 2-to-1 width to height ratio that means every wall will be 0.5 units tall.

So now that we know what size our walls are going to be let’s finish up this post by building one and drawing it to screen. It will be one unit wide, half a unit tall and we will put it half a unit away from the camera. Since the camera, by default, sits at (0,0,0) and faces in the negative Z direction that means we want to put the wall at (0,0,-0.5).

Digital Carpentry

To build this wall we need two things:

1) Some geometry describing the shape of the wall

2) A “material” describing how the wall should be colored and textured.

var wallGeometry = new THREE.PlaneGeometry( 1, 0.5 );
 var wallMaterial = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial( );
 var wall = new THREE.Mesh( wallGeometry, wallMaterial );
 wall.position.z = -0.5;
 scene.add( wall );

For our geometry we used a simple plane, basically a flat rectangle with whatever width and height we want.

For our material we use the default MeshBasicMaterial. Without any special arguments this represents a simple flat coat of white digital paint. The only interesting thing about is that it’s a one sided texture; you can only see it from the front. Look at the wall from behind and it’s invisible. This is actually very useful (and efficient) because most of the time you only want to draw one side of a shape anyways. We will only ever look at our maze from the inside and a character like Mario should only ever be seen from the outside.

Now that we have our rectangle and our boring white material we can mix them together into a an actual useable 3D mesh. We then push its z position away from the camera by half a unit and add the final objection to our scene. Remember, only objects that are part of the scene get rendered!

But how do we make that rendering happen? Simple enough, we just have to set up a function with a few three.js hooks and then call it.

var render = function () {
   requestAnimationFrame( render );

   renderer.render(scene, camera);
};

render();

And with that we have a wall. A single, bland wall that frankly doesn’t look very 3D at all. We could have done the same thing with a single 2D draw rectangle call. But it’s a start.

Yes, it’s a boring screenshot but just think how easy it would be to compress!

Bonus Project!

Earlier I said that the exact size of our wall didn’t matter since we could make small walls look big by getting up close or big walls look small by backing away. Test this out by making the wall two or five or ten times bigger (or smaller) while also changing its z position to be two or five or ten times further away (or closer). You should notice that as long as the ratio of size to distance is constant you’ll get the exact seem fills-most-of-the-screen rectangle no matter what sizes you choose.

Let’s Illustrate Planetbase Part 5: The Key To Success Is Low Expectations

Thanks to our unreliable wind turbine the Fault Inc base was able to barely scrape through the night without any causalities. And that means we unlock our first milestone: Survival. Admittedly making it through the game’s first day isn’t all that impressive but I’ll take whatever positive reinforcement I can get.

People in suits shaking hands is what business is all about, right?

All things considered that’s a LOT of construction work for one day, seven people a couple robots.

If you look at the full size screenshot you’ll notice a few potentially interesting things. Besides the turbine and the solar panels there’s a glowing blue cylinder. That’s a huge battery and while it wasn’t finished in time to help with the first night it should smooth out life support in the coming weeks. On the right side of the base there are a bunch of more of domes. Admittedly they are more or less identical so you’ll just have to take my word that one is a dorm, one is a cafeteria and one is a hydroponics space farm. That weird black skeleton is the beginnings of a mine so we can start properly exploiting this big ball of rock.

I’ll admit I wonder if I’m building too many different things too fast. Or too slowly. Guess we’ll have to find out the hard way.

Let’s Illustrate Planetbase Part 4: A Little Brain Damage Never Hurt Anybody

Fault Inc’s disastrous first colony taught us a few important things; namely that Planetbase has a pretty fast moving day/night cycle and that colonists asphyxiate really quickly when their solar powered life support all shuts down.

So for colony #2 I try to avoid this problem by building not only a solar panel but also a decent sized wind turbine right as soon as we land.

Which reminds me, did you know your colonists bring construction robots with them to each colony? They don’t seem to work any harder or faster than your human construction experts but more helping hands is always useful and I guess it’s nice not having to worry about providing them with food or air.

Our cute little construction bot puts the finishing touches on a solar panel.

Turbine probably not drawn to scale.

I had hoped using winds as a backup energy source would solve all my nocturnal oxygen problems but it turns out that the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day on this particular planet (which took me by surprise; living in Oklahoma has given me weird ideas about “normal” weather). So my overnight electrical supply was more or less random and that meant life support was on and off all night as well. Fortunately while the colony’s oxygen levels got dangerously low on multiple occasions the electricity always kicked back in before anybody actually died. Admittedly a night like that should probably have left everybody suffering from the side effects of CO2 poisoning and partial brain death but I’m pretty sure Planetbase doesn’t simulate any of that so let’s just pretend I didn’t bring it up.

Let’s Illustrate Planetbase Part 3: Maslow’s Hierarchy… IN SPACE!

When we last left Fault Inc’s first space colony things were looking pretty good. We had a set of solar panels producing tons of electricity that we then used to power both a water extractor and an oxygen plant. Toss in all the freeze dried food the colonists brought with them and the future is looking bright!

At least until the sun goes down.

No sun means no solar energy. No solar energy means no electricity, which means no water which means no oxygen.

As you might imagine the Fault Inc colonists are not happy about this and start complaining.

You already had twelve hours of oxygen today. What more do you want?

The good news is that they stop complaining pretty quickly. The bad news is that they stop because they’re all dead.

On the bright side poor Jude apparently died happy.

Well shoot. Not only did several brave astronauts lose their lives but Fault Inc’s insurance premiums are probably going to skyrocket too. We’d better be extra careful with the next colony.

Let’s Illustrate Planetbase Part 2: How Hard Is Rocket Science, Really?

When you first try to play Planetbase there’s a big popup suggesting you should complete the tutorial mode before trying to settle an actual planet, but I’m going to completely ignore it in favor of clicking on buttons myself and seeing what happens. For example, it turns out that clicking the “Start Game” button triggers an adorable cinematic of your space capsule landing and your brave space pioneers emerging.

And you thought it felt good to get out and stretch your legs after a long car trip.

The best thing about camping in space is there are no mosquitoes.

Now I’m no space expert but I’ve read enough sci-fi to know the obvious top priority for a space base is air. And the easiest way to get air is by electrically splitting water, which means I need some power and water. Fortunately solar panels and water extraction systems come as pre-unlocked tech so I toss up some panels, drill for water and then set up an oxygen plant for my base.

Things are looking pretty good for Fault Inc’s first extraterrestrial colony!

Let’s Illustrate Planetbase Part 1: Everything Is Better In Space

Planetbase is a town management sim whose claim to fame is that it takes place in space, meaning it’s not enough to just worry about whether your citizens are happy and well fed in their newly built settlement. You also have to worry about whether or not they have enough oxygen or too much cosmic radiation. How much you have to worry about this depends a lot on the planet you choose to settle.

Since I’m going into this game blind I only have access to the easiest of planets: Class D. It’s a dustball with a thick CO2 atmosphere and while humans can’t breath that the fact that it at least has an atmosphere should help with everything from providing wind power to screening out a certain amount of cosmic radiation and debris. It would also make this an attractive planet for terraforming but I don’t think this game cares about so oh well.

Anyways, first up we need to name our base. Now let’s see… who do we know that both desperately needs a way off planet and has enough money to fund a space program?

Why none other than Fault, who as you may recall ended her last adventure by kind of sort of betraying her orders from a powerful Emperor and thus winding up on his hit list. Still, at least she managed to amass a large fortune in the process and what better way to spend that than on space exploration.

Extensive experience with stabbing monsters totally qualifies Fault to run a space based industrial firm, right?

Thus is born “Fault Inc”.

No, this has no impact on the game at all but after the last two Let’s Illustrates it would be sad if Fault didn’t at least get a cameo in this one.