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Comment by bringtheaction | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering if it’s possible to use A-frame without the HTML stuff so to speak. Can I sort of just hand meshes and a camera position directly to A-frame? I am writing a video game currently in “fake” 3D with JS and Canvas and once I have the gameplay mechanics down I intend to rewrite it with WebGL and I was wondering if A-frame could then give me the ability to let people experience my game in VR.

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The HTML stuff mainly abstracts Three.js objects for faster development and better composition. Since Three.js is already an abstraction of WebGL you may have more luck with it by making a threejs plugin that "hand meshes and a camera position" to the Three.js scene/geometries.

But honestly my experience on this subject is that it would be much more manageable and productive to make the game directly with A-Frame or at least with threejs. If you need a particuliar behaviour you can go down from A-Frame to threejs and from threejs to WebGL and build the relevant components/plugins.

I'm not 100% sure, but looking at the documentation, you can manually use/tweak the three.js objects underneath A-Frame. [1]

They seem to discourage it though, or, it seems like they'd rather you use the markup implementation.

[1] https://aframe.io/docs/0.8.0/introduction/javascript-events-...

Actually, on the contrary, we prefer A-Frame be used as a framework over three.js, and not trying to abstract it. It's sort of a way to organize/encapsulate three.js code as a declarative ECS framework.

Yeah, document.querySelector('a-scene').scene provides you the three.js scene, you can dump whatever you want in there.

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