Hi Guys,

It has been a long time since I have used these forums as I quit poker a while ago. I was however drawn back here for the Programming sub tree as I have been pursuing programming for a while now, and you guys have helped me in the past.

Anyways, I need help starting a project and was hoping I could get some advice, or be directed to a site that could help me.

I want to make a web based program that will use a grid. Here is an example: the user wants to make a 2D grid 10x10, he can then click on any of these points on the grid, and then it will go into 3D mode where it displays the location the user has clicked. My question is where do I even start building this from scratch? Are there any good frameworks that work with grids/3D graphics?

One option that came to mind was to just use Unity. I do like the idea of using Unity, but my partner was trying to think if there was a way to do this from scratch. Re inventing the wheel I know, but it would be nice to own everything. If my example was to vague, you can think of this program as a sort of simplistic Unity clone (just the grid part).

I think I will propose this issue on Reddit as well, but any advice would be super helpful and appreciated. If you need any more details let me know, and have a great day.

When you say "web based program" do you mean something that runs in the browser? Or something that communicates with a webserver via an API? Because running it in the browser is probably going to constrain you a lot. I guess maybe look at webgl. I don't know much about it's capabilities.

I am sure there are lots of nice gl-based engines otherwise. I have never used them - I do stuff directly in opengl. The learning curve is steep, it is very difficult to make good looking stuff. It is a ****ing wonder that games work at all and look as good as they do, tbh.

I'm just going to need this to run in a web browser, we are working on a site to host it. But I will also need it to save user data (thinking through MySQL). webgl definitely popped into my mind first, but I am worried about constraints and performance. However, webgl looks amazing, and I have wanted to try making a program with it. I guess I will have to play around with it.

Thank you for the response, I really appreciate it.