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by tuckerconnelly 1770 days ago
React is inspired by the DOM and they split it before 1.0 IIRC, but that misses the forest for the trees. The main issue I had is that React, Three.js, and R3F are all hierarchical/tree-like (what you and Three.js are calling a graph). You can technically yes, build 3D scenes, but anything non-trivial will be very awkward.

Let's say you're building a game where you want a sphere to stick to whatever player you throw it at. How would you do that with a scene graph/OOP model? It'd be awkward, removing objects from one parent and adding them to another. Even more awkward if it's a complex object and you only want a part of that complex object to stick to the player. ECS + a constraint or physics system does a decent job (not perfect) of handling this in a relatively elegant and performant way.

I've used Three.js enough--built my portfolio[1] out of it, and then switched to Babylon when I realized how little I liked Three.js. For the record, I also dislike Babylon.

[1] https://tuckerconnelly.com

1 comments

i have yet to encounter something that shouldn't be expressed as a graph. three, babylon, ogl, blender, gltf, cad, games, they're all scene aligned. that doesn't seem to be a conflict since you still use shaders, physics, ecs and so on.

could you go more into detail what you mean when you say "anything non trivial"? is there a real example of something that would not be possible to create in, say, threejs?