Whenever I see Box2D mentioned (the library by the same author as Box3D, obviously), I think back to this story from many years ago

https://kotaku.com/this-guy-created-angry-birds-physics-and-...

Oh, nice! What a wonderful surprise!

Very easy to build, and quite small. A release build of the library is 916K (on macos at least). I have a game engine that compiles to WASM for web, and having 3D physics has been a challenge. 3D physics libraries tend to be large and hard to compile. I didn't try yet, but compiling this into a WASM library with emscripten should be easy, and it's likely small enough to be justifiable for a simple web game.

Box2D was a foundation for a lot of interesting physics oriented indie games in my day.

I wonder if the landscape is empty enough for a resurgence.

Yes! This is exciting to see. Erin Catto is such a cool hacker. Thank you, Erin, for sharing your code with the open source community.

There wasn't anything about determinism in the announcement, but I'd really love to see some more about that, too. Trying to use Unity's built-in physics to make a networked billiards game is quite troubling, when none of the clients can happily agree on what happened.

Physics simulation is a dangerous rabbit hole. Even if you focus just on rigid bodies and just physical plausibility there are plenty of open problems related to collision detection and collision resolution. Convex approximations and/or decompositions for geometry and hand tuning of solvers are the norm, balancing robustness and precision against speed.

Oh I'm so ready for this.. I've had some success with Box2D in the past, it's well and truly one of the top bits of F/OSS out there.

Box3D-based Spectre VR? It's so happening. (Shades of Tanarus ..)

EDIT: holy smokes, the transition to recording and playback in the Legend of California demo (Unreal Engine-based) is quite a jarring leap. If you at first get the impression things are quite basic, be sure to get into at least 18:00 into the demo video, it gets pretty wild .. recording and playback is awesome.

I'm a bit familiar with Rapier (and before that Cannon and Ammo) so how does it compare?

PS: FWIW made my own physics engine in 3D space just few weeks ago (and shared it here). OK ok ... it's just a 1-liner that brings an object down at regular interval but it's surprising how well it works already! I recommend you give it a go as from a learning perspective it's really fun.

> 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.

wait....

I remember reading about it in S&Box's (Source-2-based game engine) blog a while back - glad to see it released out to the public!

I do wonder how it compares against Jolt. Both seem to have a good pedigree, one from Valve and Eric Catto, and another used in Horizon games.