Newsletter – Issue 002

📆 2022-12-20

This is the second issue of the Web Game Dev Newsletter! 🚀

🔥 Headlines

2 node-based shader graph editors got released: NodeToy (opens in a new tab), a platform to create, fork, share, and export shader effects to GLSL, or to Three.js (opens in a new tab) and React Three Fiber (opens in a new tab) via a NodeToy URL in your components. If NodeToy is a little too platform-y for you, you will like Alma (opens in a new tab) by Emil Widlund (opens in a new tab), a similar tool to create GLSL shaders via a neat UI that lets you jump right into a graph playground without any account.

It looks like we may be getting WebGPU in Chrome desktop (opens in a new tab) sometime around May 2022!

SvelteKit hit version 1.0 (opens in a new tab), which is the perfect opportunity to bring your attention to Threlte (opens in a new tab), the equivalent of React Three Fiber in the Svelte (opens in a new tab) world. Thanks to the way Svelte works, you can animate Threlte objects directly instead of manipulating the underlying Three.js object via refs like you would do in R3F. The version 5 of Threlte got released recently with some major changes (opens in a new tab), including an API that's closer to R3F, but the docs are still transitioning to the new paradigm. Note that Threlte has built-in (opens in a new tab) support for the Rapier (opens in a new tab) physics engine!

There is now an experimental API to bring up a WebXR System Keyboard (opens in a new tab) on Meta Quest.

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