> 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.
There weren't many free and open source 3D physics engines to begin with. The ancient forefathers are ODE, Bullet and Newton Dynamics (all first released in the early 2000s), then nothing(?) for nearly two decades until Jolt in 2021 and now Box3D.
Any addition to this small and exclusive list is very welcome :)
I remember trying this back in 2004 or so when i was making my first real 3D game engine, but i ended up abandoning it because i was trying to use it on 64bit Linux and the source code had typecasts between pointers and (32bit) ints all over the place :-P.
That was fixed later and apparently the engine was used in a few commercial games during the 2000s and early 2010s.
Box2D is still pretty darn good! Definitely recommended for 2D physics game projects. The C APIs for Box2D and now Box3D are just so nice to work with.
I went ahead and wishlisted his legend of California game. Probably won’t use Box3D, I’m not a fan of low level programming. I will look forward to the abstraction layers above it
Some years ago, I used Box2D from Python to get a couple of bodies moving naturally in a 2D plane, lightly disturbed by random impulses (like water lilies in a pond when it's raining). It was a fun project and working with Box2D was pleasant. Looking forward to using Box3D!
I feel like Box2D, was pretty good for the time, I didn't feel like it aged quite as well, mostly because where the solutions built internally went, but hoping box3d is great for it's time as well, would love lots of fun physics engines.
Have you tried the latest Box2D (it started as the experimental Box2c)? It’s pretty good afaict. It may not be what you want specifically in your 2D game, as often people prefer more arcade-like mechanics than the physics it tries to deliver.
I have been using an in-house/handrolled physics engine for the last few years so not sure if something has changed, but being able to modify the physics engine for arcade or other non-realistic style games was a big let down over time as well.
Basically optimizing your game for feel was quite hard with Box2D in general.
For a long time there wasn't deformers in Box2D (not sure if it's in there now), I hacked by own but I was a dumb 17yo and it was a horrid mess back in the day. Maybe AI could do better than the old me, but I gave up pretty quickly after not getting good results.
So basically lack of support for non-rigid bodies and lack of easy customisability made it not age well for someone like me.
But I know people who have had performance issues with it when building large maps/worlds as well so there are other issues.
Again all of these could have been fixed if they paid more attention to it, more dev time, but it was free so I couldn't really ask for more as a broke student.
And best part was you could run it on any hardware, I remember cooking up a small 2d demo on a rpi back in the day. Fun times.
wait....
Box3D
3D
3
Hope!
I wonder if the landscape is empty enough for a resurgence.
Any addition to this small and exclusive list is very welcome :)
I remember trying this back in 2004 or so when i was making my first real 3D game engine, but i ended up abandoning it because i was trying to use it on 64bit Linux and the source code had typecasts between pointers and (32bit) ints all over the place :-P.
That was fixed later and apparently the engine was used in a few commercial games during the 2000s and early 2010s.
I spent many of my teenage and early adult years trying to replicate it in HTML5. Finally got the Open Source version of IB2 largely ported during COVID: https://github.com/JoshTheDerf/Incredibots-2-HTML5-Open-Sour...
For a long time there wasn't deformers in Box2D (not sure if it's in there now), I hacked by own but I was a dumb 17yo and it was a horrid mess back in the day. Maybe AI could do better than the old me, but I gave up pretty quickly after not getting good results.
So basically lack of support for non-rigid bodies and lack of easy customisability made it not age well for someone like me.
But I know people who have had performance issues with it when building large maps/worlds as well so there are other issues.
Again all of these could have been fixed if they paid more attention to it, more dev time, but it was free so I couldn't really ask for more as a broke student.
And best part was you could run it on any hardware, I remember cooking up a small 2d demo on a rpi back in the day. Fun times.
I have to say, based on those videos, that is one accurately-named engine.