Yep, the next step is definitely collision detection.  I’ve tried this before so I have some context to start from so hopefully I can get something in place pretty soon.  I was thinking about collision detection on a long drive yesterday and I think I’ll need to split collision detection into at least three different types.  First, normal collisions between the player and the environment.  This will be the most complicated type of system because I need to detect and respond to collisions between a capsule representing the player and arbitrary meshes in the world.  Second, collisions between enemies and the world.  I think I can simplify this to sphere-sphere collision detection by simply defining the collision zones of all objects as oversized spheres.  Some things don’t lend themselves well to being defined by spheres, for instance a fence.  But it doesn’t matter if an enemy will never walk right up next to any particular object in the world.  It won’t look weird if a boar is never standing right next to a fence object, just as long as no boar ever walks through the fence.  I think the sphere-sphere collision system will be needed because these collisions will have to be handled by the server, and there are potentially a lot of those to calculate multiple times a second.  Third, I’ll need to be able to calculate collisions between players and enemies for battle.  If you swing your sword I need to know if you are close enough to an enemy to hit it.  I think I can use the raycasting capabilities built into THREE.js to do this.

I’ll start with the hardest general case, then maybe the others will be pretty straightforward.  This will take me a while and I may not post many updates while I’m working on it, so stay tuned.