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]
In what way is it revolutionary? Genuinely asking. Is there something Box3D can do that all the other 3d physics engines can’t?
From what I saw: showing a gazillion instances of the same 2 objects.
Written in C, not C++, is one for me. I’m writing a little hobby game in C.
Having more options is always good. Box3d uses box2d’s api which is familiar for a lot of developers. Box3d also adapts a lot of Erin catto’s latest research. He’s pretty foundational to game physics, with many physics engines being built off his work and research, like jolt. Box3d is also very fast with a blazingly fast broad phase collision pass.
Also Box3d is one of very few physics engines that simulates proper gyroscopic torques.
Performance mostly
We’re in the diminishing returns part of the curve for almost all technology.
It’s open source.
Not sure why that demo is cool.
