Space-Truckers: The Repository

Exploration is an important learning tactic for the discovery of new knowledge. Its converse, exploitation, is an equally important tactic used to convert passing knowledge into actionable skills. The key to maximizing learning is the proper application of each type of learning at the appropriate level and time. With tight iterative exchanges between the two, it is possible to learn a lot in a little amount of time.

Our journey has many stops and signposts along the way to help assist and guide us toward our destination, and in the spirit of maximizing learning, each chapter represents an evolution toward our goal that includes live, runnable examples (exploration) along with the exact source code for the application at that point of the journey.

Figure 1.8 – View the application source in context with the stage of your journey

We accomplish this in a simple fashion via the use of Git branches – one for each chapter involving the application code. In addition, each chapter may have one or more Playground snippets (see Chapter 2, Ramping up on Babylon.js, for more on the Playground) specific to the content covered in that chapter. Snippets are neat in a lot of ways and one of those is that they can have multiple revisions. Toggling between different revisions of a snippet is a great way to visually see how an example has evolved and can help bring insights as to why a particular piece of code behaves as it does.

Maybe things were going OK but then you’ve found yourself stuck on something that you just can’t figure out. That’s OK too – there are places you can go for help! Create a post or add to an existing one in the Discussions board over at https://github.com/jelster/space-truckers/discussions for questions, comments, or concerns about content in the repository and/or book. Questions more general to BJS can be posted over at the BJS community forums – https://forum.babylonjs.com. Creating an account for both GitHub and the BJS Forums can be relatively quick and painless.

Tip

If you are planning to create both a BJS Forum and a GitHub account login, save yourself half the effort by signing up for GH first. Then, when you create your forum account, you can select the Login With GitHub option, supplying the information for your newly created GH account.

The Space-Truckers repository has more than just the source code and discussions, though. It also hosts the Issue Tracker for the game (https://github.com/jelster/space-truckers/issues), which is where people can request a new feature or file a bug report – it’s also where folks looking to contribute to the project can peek to find something suitable to their abilities.

Tip

Another pro-tip offered pro rata via the cost of this book: Scan through issues with the labels good-first-issue and needs-help. Those are ones the repository’s maintainers either need assistance with or feel that the issue represents a gentle introduction to the code base.

Community contributions are what Open-Source Software (OSS) is all about, but because they are largely volunteer-driven, there’s always more work than there are people that can get that work done. Consequently, most maintainers are thrilled whenever somebody submits a Pull Request – a set of changes to be incorporated into the code base – to the project that resolves an existing issue!

Tip

Getting tired of these yet? Fair enough. Final tip: Even projects like BJS with many maintainers working full time on it have this problem. The maintainers might not be having to scrounge donations to keep servers on, but they do have to scrounge for the time to accomplish everything that we want them to!

It can be difficult to synthesize and learn new things when it feels like you’re in drinking all the newness through a firehose. That’s why the Space-Truckers code base is branched by chapter. Though an individual chapter won’t necessarily resemble the current, final game as represented in the main or develop branches (production and beta environments, respectively), each branch has as much complexity as it needs to have for that point in the book and no more. To put it differently, the evolution of the application will mirror the evolution of our journey as it unfolds.