Comment on Box3D | A revolutionary new physics engine developed by Erin Catto in collaboration with a Valve dev
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Pretty sure most game engines already have 3D physics engines… Which is why this news keeps falling flat. I don’t really get what’s being offered.
Is it free? Is it vastly more efficient? Is it being incorporated into one of the big three game engines?
Alyx’s physics were genuinely groundbreaking. If this includes all the features they showed off in that game, it’ll be one hell of a contender in the physics engine market.
Though it would have been more impactful (ha) if they had released it six years ago alongside Alyx, back when the free physics options were all kind of crap compared to the commercial ones. Jolt has become the de facto free 3d physics solution within the past few years and it’s also a huge step up over the old offerings.
Usually they aren’t very good, and proprietary way. This is fully open source and has some really good features like determinism and multi-threaded. It is much more precise and performant as well.
If you check the blog post you can see that the impetus for making this game engine was how buggy Unreal Engine’s “Chaos” physics engine was.
Its FOSS. It does some things better, specifically than Unreal. Box2D is quite famous and well supported. Read the blog post if you want to know more details.
I’ve said what I’ve said, and asked what I’ve asked. The answers aren’t in the link. “Maybe one day” is the answer.
Answers are in the link though. Unreal’s physics engine did not meet his expectations so he rolled his own.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.