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Comment by RobLach | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 :)

> ancient forefathers are ODE

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.

We used ODE on Barnyard (released 2006 but started maybe two years earlier) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnyard_(video_game)

There’s some ODE/more dimensions/PDE pun in here, for somebody better than me in physics or at least funnier.

NVidia made PhysX open source in 2018, and it was free to use before.

Full List Of Open Source Physics Engines: https://www.tapirgames.com/blog/open-source-physics-engines

fyi "Bevy XPBD" got renamed to Avian Physics (it is not xpbd based anymore) https://github.com/avianphysics/avian/issues/346

Thanks for the info. Updated.

Physx and Havok have been around for a while and dominate in the games industry for a huge class of games since they are integrated in Unreal and Unity.

On the web alone, there is also:

ammo.js, - a wasm port of bullet

cannon.js, - a hand rolled engine

oimo.js, - an older hand roll

rapier.js - a newer hand roll

jolt.js - a newer engine based on the engine used in horizon zero dawn.

physx.js/wasm - nvidia wasm port of physx

havok.js/wasm - microsoft endowed wasm port of havok (used in babylon)

I've been in the space for a while, and anecdotally, PhysX is the most robust, stable, and vying for speed with Havok which is slightly faster, but makes some different accuracy choices for speed. ammo/(Bullet) was one of the earliest serious engines to make it to the web.

r.e. - Box3d - Erin Catto is pretty legendary in the physics engine scene for (box2d).. it has powered a huuuuge number of games that many of us have likely enjoyed...

So I'm definitely gonna keep my eyes on this one!

Makes me feel old, as original Bullet creator.

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 remember being hooked on Incredibots back when that was still a thing! that was how I heard about Box2D way back.

Well hello random IncrediBots-remembering person! Such good times with an oddly wholesome and welcoming community.

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...

This is so cool! I also tried replicating Incredibots during the pandemic, but abandoned it in favor of 3d stuff.

I remember every day as a kid logging on to find new vehicles, challenges, rube-goldberg machines. Some content archives are still online, but don't scratch that itch as an adult. For its time, Incredibots really nailed the sweet spot between expressiveness and ease to create content.

this looks like amazing work, i'll be checking it out. thank you

It's so cool to see people talking about Incredibots here, I also learned about Box2D from it back then, and it immediately came to mind when I saw the Box3D samples app.

I used Chipmunk2D a little back in the day, found it easier to use for whatever arcane thing I was doing.

Box2d was somewhat recently rewritten in c and the api is improved, fwiw.

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