Explorer demo (not the browser)
Andor Salga | 30 July, 2008 | 10:43
I spent a significant amount of time debugging a problem involving setting the angular velocity of the camera. After fixing it, I started writing a small test to make sure it was working like it should. I found myself writing another demo rather than a test and felt appropriate to call it Explorer since that’s basically all you can do in the demo and also because I saw myself exploring some of the maturing capabilities of the library. I will place this in the Demos section on our next release, which should be soon.
This demo doesn’t do much in terms of interaction, you walk around and explore a strange environment which has spinning teapots, but it does demonstrate the power of the library. It took very few lines to write it, less than 130 lines, most of which is initialization and only a handful that actually deal with any 3D math. This means anyone who has even a basic understanding of Javascript should not have a hard time writing a demo like this one.
Another interesting thing about this demo is the use of a basic Skybox. That’s not all that interesting until you start thinking that this can probably be added to the library. Therefore about 30 lines which is needed to create a set of flat planes and texture them can probably be reduced to just a couple to create the Skybox and give it the position of the camera. This will make creating 3D environments that much easier.
This demo doesn’t do much in terms of interaction, you walk around and explore a strange environment which has spinning teapots, but it does demonstrate the power of the library. It took very few lines to write it, less than 130 lines, most of which is initialization and only a handful that actually deal with any 3D math. This means anyone who has even a basic understanding of Javascript should not have a hard time writing a demo like this one.
Another interesting thing about this demo is the use of a basic Skybox. That’s not all that interesting until you start thinking that this can probably be added to the library. Therefore about 30 lines which is needed to create a set of flat planes and texture them can probably be reduced to just a couple to create the Skybox and give it the position of the camera. This will make creating 3D environments that much easier. 
