A 2D Physics Engine for Games
Visit box2d.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2023 – Jul 2026
Software Engineering 3Systems & Performance 2Games & Graphics 2Open Source 1
I’m happy to announce the release of Box3D, an open source 3D physics engine. It is now available on GitHub. Box3D repository You can think of Box3D as a fork of Box2D, extended with many features needed for 3D games. Some additions: Triangle mesh collision Height-field collision Baked compound collision The core…
Island management is a fundamental low level feature of physics engines and can have a big impact on solver design and performance. This was one of the first problems I decided to work on for Box2D version 3 (v3). Since I began working on v3 I’ve been comparing several algorithms for island management. My goal has…
SIMD in game development Often in game development we talk about SIMD. It is the holy grail of CPU performance, often out of reach. The conventional wisdom is that it is difficult to achieve real gains from SIMD. It is tempting to build a math library around SIMD hoping to get some performance gains. However, it often…
In a previous post SIMD Matters I discussed the big wins I got from graph coloring to make the contact solver faster. That same approach exists in Box3D. I like to call this approach “wide SIMD”. The idea is to process multiple work units at the same time. In the contact solver this means solving four contact points…