Cubes

Cubes is an isometric graphics management library. It uses Isomer, but it's meant to offer higher level scene management.

Current Support

• Frontend JS
• Browserify

Planned Support

• Full source
• Minified distribution with sourcemap
• Pull requests for other package managers are welcomed

Roadmap

• 0.0 - Finished
  • Experimental status
• 0.1 - Finished
  • Scene management
  • Depth sorting
  • Occlusion culling
• 0.2 - Finished
  • Click detection
  • Scene editing API
• 0.3 - Future
  • 3-axis slicing
  • 4-angle rotation
• 0.4
  • Isometric color picker partial
  • Basic editor partial
• 0.5
  • Transparent cubes
  • Backend rendering
• 0.6
  • Large scene support

Configuration

An example configuration, taken from the defaults:

  var canvas = document.getElementById('myCanvas');
  var cubes = new Cubes(canvas, {
    // This defines how much area is given to cube rendering and editing
    x: 32,
    y: 32,
    z: 32,
 
    // Slow mode provides a visual example of how models are rendered. The value provided indicates milliseconds between each successive render.
    slow: 10,
 
    // This determines how large the cubes and grid area are.
    scale: 10.0,
 
    // This determines the center from which all graphics are drawn. This should be set to a sensible value, but if it isn't, it can be overridden. It is measured in pixels.
    originX: null,
 
    // Also available is originY. It should also be set to a sensible default, but in case it isn't...
    originY: null,
 
    // Toggles click detection for this instance of Cubes.
    clickDetection: false,
 
    // Determines how different the sides of each cube of the same color are in lightness.
    colorDifference: 0.10,
 
    // This is the position of the light source for lighting the scene. It's a directional light, so a larger number indicates the light is further away, but it is not a point light.
    lightX: 3, lightY: -5, lightZ: 1,
 
    // Do you want a base plan upon which to build upon? No? Set it to false, then.
    planeXY: true
  });

Scene Management

Current methods:

• insert()

This will return a special scene ID that's used internally by Cubes to keep track of cubes in a quickly accessible format. This will change if a different size cube area is specified. Please use x, y, & z format for storing and retrieving cube information.

Planned methods:

• remove()
• find()
• edit()
• export()
• load()

Insert

A simple insert method in addition to color data.

  cubes.insert({
    x: x,
    y: y,
    z: z,
    color: '#ff00ff'
  });

Click Detection

Click detection must be enabled, using the clickDetection configuration property, as shown above.

cubes.click(x, y);

Example

  $('#myCanvas').on('click', function (evt) {
    cubes.click(evt.offsetX, evt.offsetY);
  });

Utility Methods

Some additional useful utility methods are available.

Random Colors

cubes.randomColor().toHex()

Testing

Be sure to see what's being done in the cubes-tests.js file. Tests can be run with Meteor installed and running the meteor test-packages ./ command.