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]
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 1 day ago
This sounds like a big selling point to me.
From what I understand, many of the existing physics engines are non-deterministic, which can make networking physics interactions in certain types of games pretty difficult.
GreyCat@piefed.social 1 day ago
Yep, yep!
RaphaelSchmitz@feddit.org 22 hours ago
Difficult to say, but I see points against this being a silver bullet of any sort.
A competitive game like starcraft wouldn’t be responsive enough if they transferred all unit data every tick. So they use a lockstep model, where only player commands are transferred, and they are relying on a deterministic system (not just physics) playing out the same on all connected machines.
However, a guideline for software companies is generally don’t reinvent the wheel, but “the secret sauce” should be your own. I imagine for competitive online games, the code that makes the network interaction crisp is part of the secret sauce. Such games, StarCraft, MMORPGs etc, also tend to have simpler game-relevant physics. Colliders so characters don’t clip through each other, some simple raycasting and instant collision checks for area effects, usually.
The angle a pebble flies away from an explosion is usually not made game-relevant even in single player games - so it’s not because they can’t, it’s because it doesn’t mesh with the game.
It might open up faster online play for some indie games, but I don’t know if it will have an impact otherwise.