BabylonJS and the OP's own Aframe [1] seem to have similar licenses, similar number of Github stars and forks, although Aframe seems newer and more game / VR focused.
How do Babylon, Aframe, Three.js, and PlayCanvas [2] compare from those that have used them?
IIUC, PlayCanvas is the most mature, featureful, and performant, but it's commercial. Babylon is the featureful 3D engine, whereas Three.js is fairly raw. Though it has some nice stuff for animation, textures, etc., you're really building your own kit.
Any good experiences (or bad) with any of these?
OP, your demo is rock solid! What's the pitch for Aframe?
How do you see the "gaussian splat" future panning out? Will these be useful for more than visualizations and "digital twins" (in the industrial setting)? Will we be editing them and animating them at any point in the near future? Or to rephrase, when (or will) they be useful for the creative and gaming fields?
A-Frame is an entity component system on top of THREE.js that uses the DOM as a declarative layer for the scene graph. It can be manipulated using the standard APIs and tools that Web developers are used to. Initial target was onboarding Web devs into 3D but found success beyond. The super low barrier of entry (hello world below) without sacrificing functionality made it very popular for people learning programming / 3D (part of the curriculum in many schools / universities) and in advanced scenarios (moonrider.xyz ~100k MAUs (300k MAUs at peak) most popular WebXR content to date is made with A-Frame)
One of the Spark goals is exploring applications of 3D Gaussian Splatting. I don't have all the answers yet but already compelling use cases quickly developing. e.g photogrammetry / scanning where splats represent high frequency detail in an appealing and relatively compact way as you can see in one of the demos (https://sparkjs.dev/examples/interactivity/index.html). There are great examples of video capture already (https://www.4dv.ai/). Looking forward to seeing new applications as we figure out better compression, streaming, relighting, generative models, LOD...
When you say that PlayCanvas is commercial, that's a little misleading. The PlayCanvas Engine (analogous to Three.js and Babylon.js) is free and open source (MIT). The PlayCanvas Engine is where you'll find all the cool 3DGS tech. There are two further frameworks that wrap the Engine (for those that prefer to use a declarative interface): PlayCanvas Web Components and PlayCanvas React. Again, both of these are free and open source (MIT). Only the PlayCanvas Editor (analogous to a browser-based Unity) has optional payment plans (for those that want to create private projects).
Did a test study in BabylonJS, and generally the subset of compatible features is browser specific.
The good:
1. Blender plugin for baked mesh animation export to stream asset is cool
2. the procedural texture tricks combined with displacement maps mean making reasonable looking in game ocean/water possible with some tweaking
3. adding 2D sprite swap out for distant objects is trivial (think Paper Mario style)
The bad:
1. burns gpu vram far faster than normal engines (dynamic paint bloats up fast when duplicating aliases etc. )
2. JS burns CPU cycles, but the wasm support is reasonable for physics/collision
3. all resources are exposed to end users (expect unsophisticated cheaters/cloners)
The ugly:
1. mobile gpu support on 90% of devices is patchwork
2. baked lighting ymmv (we tinted the gpu smoke VFX to cheat volumetric scattering)
3. in browser games essentially combine the worst aspects of browser memory waste, and security sandbox issues (audio sync is always bad in browser games)
Anecdotally, I would only recommend the engine for server hosted transactional games (i.e. cards or board games could be a good fit.)
Otherwise, if people want something that is performant, and doesn't look awful.... Than just use the Unreal engine, and hire someone that mastered efficient shader tricks. =3
Personaly I have been using babylonJs for five years. And I just love it. For me it's so easy to program ( cleanest API I have ever seen) and my 3D runtime is so light, my demos work fine even on my android phone.
Web browsers add a lot of unnecessary overhead, and require dancing with quarterly changes in policies.
In general, most iOS devices are forced to use/link their proprietary JS vm API implementation. While Babylon makes it easier, it often had features NERF'd by both Apple iOS, and Alphabet Android. In the former case it is driven by a business App walled garden, and in the latter it is device design fragmentation.
I like Babylon in many ways too, but we have to acknowledge the limitations in deployment impacting end users. People often end up patching every update Mozilla/Apple/Microsoft pushes.
Thus, difficult to deploy something unaffected by platform specific codecs, media syncing, and interface hook shenanigans.
This coverage issue is trivial to handle in Unity, GoDot, and Unreal.
The App store people always want their cut, and will find convenient excuses to nudge that policy. It is the price of admission on mobile... YMMV =3
One component of my hobby web app project is a wavetable. Below are two examples of wavetables. I want it to not tax the browser so that other, latency sensitive, components do not suffer.
Would you have any suggestions on what JS/TS package to use? I built a quick prototype in three.js but I am neither a 3D person nor a web dev, so I would appreciate your advice.
* recall fixed rate producer/consumers should lock relative phase when the garbage collector decides to ruin your day, things like software FIR filters are also fine, and a single-thread output pre-mixed stream will eventually buffer though whatever abstraction the local users have setup (i.e. while the GC does its thing... playback sounds continuous.)
Inside a VM we are unfortunately at the mercy of the garbage collector, and any assumptions JIT compiled languages make. Yet wasm should be able to push io transfers fast enough for software mixers on modern cpus.
> REPLs are not useful design tools (though, they are useful exploratory tools)
I disagree with this. I’m a Clojure dev, and most of the time, I use the REPL to iterate on features, fix bugs, and refactor, thanks to the fast feedback loop.
I used to be a Java dev—oh god, restarting the whole app after every change made me want to shoot myself in the head. Now, I use the REPL to build what I want and then move on. This brings joy back to programming.
I’m not saying other languages are bad, but working with Clojure is more enjoyable for me. I’m at least 2-3 times faster than I was with Java. Of course, there are techniques you need to know to write efficient and idiomatic functional code.
I could definitely see how if you work in Java or C# all day, repls feel like a neat curiosity. Picture telling someone who writes scheme in emacs that repls aren't a good design tool.
If you want to argue the point with non lisp people, I'd go to javascript or SQL as great examples where you really use repl's quite a bit.
Well, because Clojure actually has a "proper" REPL. Non-lispy languages don't have such REPLs, at best - they are interactive shells. The blogpost author doesn't seem to have experience with homoiconic languages, otherwise, I'm sure, that sentence would be different.
I'm a heavy REPL/interactive shell user so when I do Java I abuse the testing framework, basically I put my sketches in unit tests and run those. The feedback loop is pretty tight, close to what I get in some other languages, whatever happens behind the scenes in IntelliJ it's much shorter than a full recompile and boot.
Supposedly there are some Java shells around but I haven't tried them out.
Java has been able to hot swap code since the beginning? Well, maybe not the beginning. But very early versions.
The standard runtime didn't like some redefinition. But there were alternatives. Eclipse, for example, would purposely let you get otherwise broken code running so that you could breakpoint and replace as you went.
Apparently Graal lets you hotswap. I tried getting it working about a year ago, but couldn't figure out how to install it with Gradle toolchains, so gave up at that point. I should probably look at it again. Anybody using this?
Thanks for taking the leap by making a game with Clojure!
I’m a aspiring gamedev and my focus so far has been working bottom up with C and friends. But I do love Lisp and especially Clojure, I’m really hopeful now that Jank is gonna be a full time project this year.
> WebGPU and web games are said to be catching up to native-level performance, and some argue they’re already there.
I can’t agree with that, sorry. I’m developing 3D games for the web, and the limitations are asset size, memory size, and CPU/GPU constraints feel like developing games with 2001-era resources. The web isn’t there yet, and I’m not sure it will be anytime soon. There are some impressive apps leveraging the web’s fast distribution, but 3D games are harder in that regard. You can create content-rich, visually appealing 3D games, but then you severely limit your audience. I’m considering moving to native game development because the web’s limitations are daunting.
