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]
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.