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BabylonJS Typescript Logic Examples

This repo is a collection of simple examples showing some ways of handling game logic within Babylon JS. This list is in no way exhaustive as Babylon is a very unopinionated framework.

These are also only my personal experiences so don't consider this an authoritative souce but more as an example to get you started on your own ideas.

Building Examples

• Run npm install
• Run npm buildX where X is the number of the directory (1 is Inheritance, 2 is Behaviours & Observables, etc.)
• Run npm buildAll to build all examples
• Each example will have its output in its own dist directory

Observations

Please do note that these are my personal experiences and should in no way taken as gospel for or against these options.

Inheritance

Pros:

• Works well with how the Babylon project is structured
• Requires no external libraries
• Basic OOP makes it easy to learn
• Integrates well with Babylon scene tree
• Easy to debug

Cons:

• General problems with OOP inheritance model
• Have to write a lot of your own logic to keep references to game objects
• I just don't like it very much

Behaviours and Observables

Pros:

• Integrates well with Babylon
• Requires no external libraries
• Very well thought out design
• Very flexible in how to handle your logic
• Easy to extend your own custom behaviours
• Flexible options with how observers are scoped and when they are called
• Very nice to work with in a typed language
• Easy to attach and remove behaviours
• Easy to debug

Cons:

• Somewhat boilerplate-y
• Querying objects for behaviours relies on strings which isn't quite as nice as querying class references
• Potential performance concerns (not that I've run into any performance issues with it yet but it would be easy to create poor-performing code with lots of closures in a behavior class)

ECS

Pros:

• Very intuitive once you've wrapped your head around the pattern
• Apparently very performant
• Forced to organise code reasonably well
• Excellent separation of concerns
• Querying components based on class reference is nice when working with TS (this is particular to the tick-knock library)
• Easy to debug

Cons:

• Very boilerplate-y
• Takes a while to set up (but pays off massively on larger projects)
• Takes some time to adjust how to manage logic when working in a new paradigm
• Does not integrate with Babylon's scene tree very well (feels quite separate)

Event Based Architecture

Pros:

• A lot of fun
• Entities are mostly completely separated and only communicate via an event bus which prevents tight coupling
• nanoevents library is a joy to use with TS
• Easier to integrate into Babylon's scene tree than ECS but has similar advantages
• Allows very rapid prototyping
• Can integrate cleanly with all other systems on this list

Cons:

• Harder to debug
• Requires some rethinking of control flow logic