Babylon JS, a popular open source 3D HTML game engine, just released Babylon.js 6. Among the most exciting new features of BabylonJS is the addition of Havok physics integration, offering performance improvements of up to 20x over the existing ammo physics system. In addition to the performance improvements, there is also an all new Physics API.
Beyond the new Havok physics integration, Babylon 6 got several other new features including a new performance mode option that can result in speed increases of 50X faster! In my case the improvement was only 70%, so obviously it is going to vary from devic to device. You have a choice between Compatibility, Intermediate and Aggressive modes.
Fluid rendering is another new feature of version 6. Other new graphical features include the addition of Screen Space Reflections v2, new Texture Decals and perhaps most interestingly, improvements to the Node Material making it possible to do advanced 3D rendering techniques like Ray Marching without having to write a line of shader code. Node Material also gets the addition of Tri-Planar and Bi-Planaer projection nodes. glTF also got support for the latest extensions, adding KHR_materials_iridesence and KHR_animation_pointer glTF extensions.
Tooling also got an improvement in BabylonJS 6, with the Gui Editor added in beta in version 5 being promoted to production ready. There is also a new community provided Figma to Babylon.js importer as well as new Accessibility Screen Reader support.
Key Links
You can learn more about the Babylon.js 6 released in the video below.