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#About

Ascent is a WebGL experiment.

The setting is a space simulator.

#Goals

The main goal of Ascent is to create a tool that makes it exceptionally easy to script levels, without having to know anything about WebGL, 3D stuff or anything animation related.

The secondary goal is to have a project that is fairly self-explanatory to encourage forking, modifying and extending it.

#Status

It's a mere skeleton right now, but basic functionality is in place, like adding new levels, pausing the game, a menu, a settings panel, loading models and so on.

#Action

To see it in action, just:

• go here: http://jensarps.github.com/Ascent/
• or, fork/clone it and run it locally

#Open Issues

Too many to list here. The first things that I can think of include:

• Use instances for levels instead of the current mixin approach
• Level creation needs to be easier
• Proper scene cleanup is not working, so you can't start a new level without reloading the page
• Need to be able to save state
• Levels in campaigns must be able to depend on each other's completion; same goes for campaigns
• Need proper models; most models don't have textures
• Need sound
• Need to be able to shoot at things
• Need realistic light sources; there's light, but you can't see where it originates from
• Need more distributed lights. It might be realistic, but an object being invisible due to no light traveling in the camera's view direction isn't helpful

#Libraries

Ascent wouldn't work without the following third party libraries:

• three.js - https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
• Game Shim - https://github.com/toji/game-shim
• require.js - https://github.com/jrburke/requirejs

#Child Projects

The following projects are results of the work with Ascent and are now available as independent projects on GitHub:

• decoupled-input - https://github.com/jensarps/decoupled-input
• cockpit.js - https://github.com/jensarps/cockpit.js
• game-timer - https://github.com/jensarps/game-timer