As a technical 3D artist, Babylon has been a great way to dive into web dev, and it parallels with standard game engines just enough that I can easily find my way around the documentation.
Do you have any insights into why this is the case? What areas of simulation or tooling are difficult to work with?
Disclaimer: I'm on the Havok team and worked on the Babylon.JS integration.
I think physics engines are difficult for a few reasons:
- They don't mesh with a lot of features that modelers take for granted (non-uniform scaling, concave meshes, lax model scaling)
- It's hard know intuitively what values to use for things like acceleration, density, velocity, damping, friction. Especially because they are very inter-dependent.
- Interaction with moving kinematic or non-physics objects is an undefined behavior that has to be tested pretty rigorously.
- In gamedev, rigidbody physics are basically a trojan horse for gameplay bugs like clipping through the map and sudden bursts of high speeds (Which is both magical and frustrating). It's a non-trivial task to sandbox those behaviors completely.
- Projectiles. There's no catch-all solution for small fast-moving objects, it's always a tradeoff. But that's mostly because big O dictates it to be so.
No kidding. The "Physics" in Babylon.js is at the inexcusably "my first game engine" level of incompetence. Velocity and acceleration are treated as if they have the same dimensions. All kinds of deeply embedded movement code lacks any understanding of world time. You can definitely get a little game going quickly in it because you don't have to think about any "hard" things, but when you try running your game on systems whose frame rates differ wildly you suddenly understand why real game engines care about the fact that velocity is measured in units of m/s and acceleration in units of m/s^2, and that it matters whether you build your art assets at meter scale or centimeter scale or etc.
I'd like to use something lighter than Unity or Godot.
Do you have insights, into whether the new havoc port is better designed? They seemed to have reimplemented the whole physic architecture which they now call V2:
Good to see that Babylon.js is doing well.
Edit: On the coding side, python is great for pipelines (especially now that blender has its own module). Imagemagick is great for formatting textures and huge .tiff files. ffmpeg is the king of video formatting.