voxel.js, holla, Blitz, OneJS 2.0

voxel.js

When I was at BathCamp this week, Andrew Nesbitt mentioned voxel.js – a collection of projects for building browser-based 3D games. The core components were written by Max Ogden and James Halliday, take a look at voxel-engine (GitHub: maxogden / voxel-engine, License: BSD, npm: voxel-engine) if you want to see some code examples.

There...

voxel.js

There are lots of demos on the voxel.js site, at the moment most of them support simple world traversal and the removal of blocks just like Minecraft. The project also has add-ons which includes voxel-creature for adding NPCs and player-physics. A huge amount of effort has already gone into the project, and it was apparently inspired by the awesome 0 FPS blog posts about voxels.

holla

holla (GitHub: wearefractal / holla, License: MIT, npm: holla) from Fractal is a module for WebRTC signalling. The author calls it “WebRTC sugar” – compared to the underlying API the library’s use of methods like .pipe make it a lot easier to get the hang of.

It has some helpers for creating audio and video streams, and there’s a demo up at holla.jit.su that accesses your webcam and microphone.

Blitz

Blitz (GitHub: Blitz, License: Modified MIT) by Eli Snow can help safely extend objects, overload functions based on types and arguments, and provides some native type recognition across global contexts:

Unlike other frameworks that have one generic wrapper for every object, Blitz creates unique wrappers for every prototype. So, for example, instead of having one method replace that works only with Arrays we can have a replace method for Arrays another for HTMLElements and/or any other object type.

Some of the functionality is accessible through a chainable API, so you can do things like this:

// [35, 16]blitz([35,16,21,9]).length(2).value;

Function overloading works using blitz.overload, which accepts an object that lists types alongside target functions.

OneJS 2.0

Azer Koculu has updated OneJS to version 2.0. OneJS converts CommonJS modules to standalone, browser-compatible files. It now supports splitting bundles into multiple files, and loading them asynchronously. It also has a more flexible build system: you can use it from the command-line, package.json, or from within a Node script.