After seeing its announcement a few days ago I didn’t think much of it, but after looking into it a bit this looks awesome !
Box3D was released a few days ago by legendary developer Erin Catto accompanied by a blog post, this is the person behind the popular Box2D engine.
In the blog post he explains that his work stems from his collaboration with Dirk Gregorius, “Principal Software Engineer II and Physics Architect” at Valve, the person behind Half-Life: Alyx’s physics engine “Rubikon”, which Box3D is based off.
Facepunch has also revealed that they have been using Box3D for about a year now as well in s&box. Showcasing a cool demo
An interesting quote from the blog post:
On the Valve side, Rubikon continues to evolve and Dirk has developed optimizations (similar to those in Box3D) in a new engine called Ragnarok. Look for that in future Valve games.
👀
Did he just reveal Valve’s next physics engine ?
+HL3 confirmed
- cool showcase 1
- showcase 2
- showcase 3 in gmod (already??)
Tweet transcript
I’m happy to announce the release of a new open source 3D physics engine called Box3D. I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, but it represents over 20 years of experience writing physics engines for games. Read more here: [blog post link]
This guy made Box2D before, a high performant 2D physics engine that is free and open source and has been used in a shit ton of 2D games. So ofcourse devs are excited with this 3D physics engine. Yes it’s free and open source as well. It’s deterministic across different CPUs, which Unreal’s Chaos physics engine and Unity’s PhysX physics engine are not. This means that simulations with the exact same starting conditions will end up having the same result no matter the device the sim is running on. This a huge benefit for multiplayer games. And benchmarks say it’s performant. Someone already implemented it in Unity and it’s faster than the built in PhysX engine in most cases.
It’s basically a free alternative to Havok. Havok is also a high performant deterministic physics engine, but costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per game to use. Havok is what many triple A studios use in their games. Like Breath of the Wild uses Havok.
A small addendum: Jolt, the other new-ish free physics engine this would be competing against, is also deterministic (with some caveats that Box3D hopefully avoids) and more performant than contemporary commercial offerings (the benefit of being new and not held back by decades of accumulated cruft and early design decisions such as obsolete threading models).
What sets Box3D apart is that, like you said, many devs are already familiar with the 2d version of this engine and Box3D mimics its APIs aside from the added dimension. This makes it very easy to pick up for a large portion of the indie crowd.