Needle Engine brings together several key technologies that are required to build today’s modern 3D web apps.

• Development Environment: Needle Engine is built with TypeScript, and uses vite and node.js as development environment. This allows you to use hot reloading and fast iteration speeds, similar to other modern web development frameworks.
• Rendering: Needle uses the popular three.js library for rendering.
• Component System: Needle provides a component-based architecture for building interactive experiences. This allows you to create reusable components and attach them to objects in your scene, similar to other game engines.
  • Built-In Functionality: Needle Engine provides many built-in components that can be used to create interactive experiences. These components are designed to be easy to use and can be added to objects in your scene without writing any code.
  • Physics: We use Rapier.js for physics simulation, which is an efficient physics engine that works well in the browser.
  • Networking: Needle Engine has built-in networking capabilities, powered by WebRTC and Peer.js, running on our own networking stack.
  • Custom Components: New components can be created in TypeScript or JavaScript. We automatically generate UI for Unity and Blender so that you can easily assign and configure them in the editor.
• Data: The core asset format we use is glTF 2.0. Beyond the standard glTF features and Khronos extensions, we’re using custom extensions (called vendor extensions) to store rich scene and component data like lighting settings, physics data, audio, video and much more.
• Integrations: Needle Engine has integrations for Unity and Blender, which allow you to create and export 3D scenes directly from these applications. The integrations provide a seamless workflow for artists and developers, allowing them to use the tools they are already familiar with while taking advantage of the powerful features of Needle Engine.

Learn more about our contributions to glTF