Newsletter – Issue 003

📆 2023-01-03

Happy new year, everyone! May 2023 be a great year for you and your game projects! 🎉
Let's start the year with some fresh content to get the creative juices flowing.

🔥 Headlines

Webspaces (opens in a new tab) is a new project by Greg Fodor (opens in a new tab) built on top of Mozilla Hubs (opens in a new tab) to create and self-host 3D virtual spaces for users to visit. Webspaces are simple HTML files that can be edited directly from within the scenes they represent by writing to the local file system (opens in a new tab) or via GitHub pull requests. Visitors connect to each other via peer-to-peer WebRTC. Learn more in this blog post (opens in a new tab).

Greg also optimized and packaged for NPM (opens in a new tab) a CLI tool (opens in a new tab) for the Smooth Voxels (opens in a new tab) library, which lets you create smooth 3D models from voxels that you can author with plain text! 🤯

In the last issue, we talked about Threlte (opens in a new tab). This time, let's shed some light on PlayCanvas (opens in a new tab), a full-featured WebGL 3D engine owned by Snap (opens in a new tab) (not sponsored). It is composed of the open-source Engine (opens in a new tab), which can be used on its own for a code-first approach, and the online Editor (opens in a new tab), which has free and paid plans (opens in a new tab). Here is their 2022 showcase (opens in a new tab) and a crash course (opens in a new tab) to get started. They also make the PCUI components library (opens in a new tab).

gltfjsx (opens in a new tab) v6 is out (opens in a new tab). It's a CLI and online (opens in a new tab) tool to generate JSX components for React Three Fiber (opens in a new tab). This new version features better compression (opens in a new tab) via the --transform and --simplify flags, thanks to Don McCurdy (opens in a new tab)'s glTF-Transform (opens in a new tab), Draco (opens in a new tab), WebP (opens in a new tab), and sharp (opens in a new tab). Optimize your models right from the CLI without Blender!

⬆️ Updates

Three.js r148 (opens in a new tab) – The examples/js directory has been removed (changelog (opens in a new tab), migration guide (opens in a new tab)).
A-Frame v1.4.0 (opens in a new tab) – Switched to Custom Elements V1, Meta Quest Pro support.
Drei v9.44 to v9.50 (opens in a new tab) – Adds <Hud> (opens in a new tab) and <ScreenSpace> (opens in a new tab) for heads-up-displays, <Gltf> (opens in a new tab) to render models, <Grid> (opens in a new tab) to measure distances, <Html> (opens in a new tab) and <SoftShadows> (opens in a new tab) improvements, and the <AsciiRenderer> (opens in a new tab).

✍️ Content

✨ Games & Demos

🎮 Aritelia (opens in a new tab), a beautiful world created by Solar Games (opens in a new tab) with PlayCanvas (opens in a new tab).
🎮 Minecraft Classic (opens in a new tab) is a web port of the original Minecraft game made in Babylon.js (opens in a new tab).
🎮 Did you know the massively-successful Vampire Survivors (opens in a new tab) is made with Phaser (opens in a new tab)?
🎮 Gucci is making games (opens in a new tab) for some reason, with Three.js, React Three Fiber (opens in a new tab), and Next.js.
✨ A cool AR demo (opens in a new tab) by Mate Steinforth (opens in a new tab) on Meta Quest Pro.

See more on the ✨ Games & Demos (opens in a new tab) page or 🎮 WebGamer.io (opens in a new tab).

🌐 WebGameDev.com

✨ Games & Demos (opens in a new tab) now shows a beautiful gallery of games.
🏎 Web Game Engines & Libraries (opens in a new tab) has been updated with wrappers, WebXR, and JS OpenGL.
New 🌐 Progressive Web Apps (opens in a new tab) page.
New 🔑 Authentication (opens in a new tab) page.
New 🎮 Consoles (opens in a new tab) page.

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