b3d-death

Death needs an exit. Without one, a crash is a dead end: the input manager stays welded to the wreck, you go on "flying" a corpse, and the game is stuck. (b3d-aircraft used to say as much on crash — "Stays put until something resets it" — and nothing ever did.)

<tosi-b3d-death> is that exit. When the entity you're driving dies — flown into a hill, or shot down — it:

1. blows it up and leaves burning wreckage where it happened;
2. releases input focus (you stop driving a corpse);
3. swings the camera into a slow orbit around the wreck — you watch the mistake you made;
4. after a beat, floats a panel with what to do next.

The panel is just widgets, so "what to do next" is entirely yours: Respawn is the default, but a game can offer Rewind, Spectate, Eject and walk, Quit to menu — whatever. It's an in-scene SVG panel (b3d-svg-plane), so it works flat and in VR with the same coordinate-based picking, and needs no DOM overlay.

What it deliberately does NOT do

It doesn't respawn you. It calls the respawn callback you give it, because only the game knows what a fresh life means: a new entity at a spawn point, a saved checkpoint, a different aircraft. Death is a systemic fact; what happens next is a game decision, and this component refuses to guess.

Prefer respawning as a genuinely new entity rather than teleport-and-reset. A death that is secretly a reset is a lie the narrative layer would have to un-learn — the simulation should really emit a death and really emit a spawn, because that's the stream a driver reads (see world-contract.ts).

Demo

Fly it into the ground. (W/S pitch, A/D bank, R/Q throttle.) Watch it burn, then press Respawn on the floating panel.

import { b3d, b3dAircraft, b3dDeath, b3dLibrary, b3dGround, b3dLight, b3dSun, b3dSkybox, gameController, inputFocus } from 'tosijs-3d'

const plane = () => b3dAircraft({
  library: 'vehicles', meshName: 'scout',
  player: true, y: 80, vtolSpeed: 6, maxSpeed: 50,
})

// A respawned aircraft is appended INSIDE the focus manager — it then announces itself
// (adoptIfVacant) once it's ready, and the manager takes it because it's driving nobody.
const focus = inputFocus(gameController(), plane())

const scene = b3d(
  { gamepad: true },
  b3dLight({ y: 1, intensity: 0.5 }),
  b3dSun({ intensity: 0.9 }),
  b3dSkybox({ timeOfDay: 9 }),
  b3dGround({ meshName: 'ground_nocast', width: 600, height: 600, color: '#6b7f5e' }),
  b3dLibrary({ url: '/test-2.glb', type: 'vehicles' }),
  b3dDeath({
    title: 'DOWN',
    respawn() {
      // A fresh aircraft — NOT a reset of the dead one. The sim really emits a death and
      // really emits a spawn, which is the stream a narrative driver reads.
      //
      // No need to tell the focus manager: a controllable ANNOUNCES itself when it's ready
      // (adoptIfVacant), and the manager takes it because it's driving nobody. Asking the
      // manager to re-scan here would find `player` still false — attributes aren't drained
      // until connectedCallback.
      focus.appendChild(plane())
    },
  }),
  focus,
)
preview.append(scene)

tosi-b3d { width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Attributes

Callbacks

Never name these onFoo — elementCreator() binds any on* prop as a DOM event listener, so onRespawn would silently become addEventListener('respawn') and never fire. (See CLAUDE.md.)