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Over December I’ll be posting 100 fun insights in this thread from working on @triplex.dev in my free time for two (!) years. It’s the longest and largest side project I’ve worked on. Keep an eye out, will be a fun one! #threadapalooza #threadapalooza2024

1. Triplex is a "visual IDE" for React/Three Fiber. For visual-first dev use transforms and prop controls to set prop values while leaning on features like undo and play controls. For code-first dev it's similar to Storybook but with inbuilt dev-time features like helpers and component controls.

2. So when clicking on scene objects Triplex takes a component-first approach, meaning it prioritizes components over host elements like <mesh>. Imagine having a <House> component in your scene and you want to change its position, but clicking on it you'd select its doors or windows. Weird right?

3. Okay easy, you might be thinking. But I found this to be a Hard Problem! It took two main revisions to get to a resilient solution but both leaned on one fundamental constraint: the need to inject metadata into the scene so we can tie scene objects back to elements and components. The first...

5. ...worked great, even for components from node_modules! When clicking on a scene object we'd grab this metadata and then traverse up the Three.js scene until we found an element that was inside the open component inside Triplex. But that architecture didn't last the test of time.

6. It turns out wrapping ALL objects in groups isn't valid Three.js code so exceptions for objects that shouldn't be wrapped began. When users ran into more edge cases the errors were NOT helpful, and getting errors only inside Triplex was super confusing to everyone! Time to re-think the problem.

7. So we need a solution that doesn’t fundamentally change the Three.js object structure. What can we do? Well we need to zoom out. What levers do we have available to inject data? We have… (1) The React tree via context; and (2) The Three.js tree So these + leaning into the constraints above…