Erin Catto, creator of the popular Box2D physics engine has just moved into the 3rd dimension with the release of Box3D. The new physics engine is already being used to power the physics in the recently released S&Box game engine. This free and open source C-based physics engine brings a broad suite of features including:
Collision
- Continuous collision detection
- Contact events
- Convex hulls, capsules, spheres, triangle meshes, and height fields
- Multiple shapes per body
- Collision filtering
- Ray casts, shape casts, and overlap queries
- Sensor system
- Character mover
Physics
- Robust Soft Step rigid body solver
- Continuous physics for fast translations and rotations
- Island based sleep
- Revolute, prismatic, distance, motor, weld, and wheel joints
- Joint limits, motors, springs, and friction
- Joint and contact forces
- Body movement events and sleep notification
System
- Data-oriented design
- Written in portable C17
- Extensive multithreading and SIMD
- Optimized for large piles of bodies
- Cross platform determinism
- Recording and replay
Samples
- Uses sokol to run with D3D11 on Windows, Metal on macOS, and OpenGL 4.5 on Linux.
- Graphical user interface with imgui.
- Many samples to demonstrate features and performance.
You can read full details of why it was created in the article below.
Key Links
You can learn more about Box3D, why it was created and what other 3D physics solutions are available in the video below.