Box3D | A revolutionary new physics engine developed by Erin Catto in collaboration with a Valve dev (x.com)

submitted 4 days ago by GreyCat@piefed.social to c/programming@programming.dev

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After seeing its announcement a few days ago I didn't think much of it, but after looking into it a bit this looks awesome !

Box3D was released a few days ago by legendary developer Erin Catto accompanied by a blog post, this is the person behind the popular Box2D engine.

In the blog post he explains that his work stems from his collaboration with Dirk Gregorius, "Principal Software Engineer II and Physics Architect" at Valve, the person behind Half-Life: Alyx's physics engine "Rubikon", which Box3D is based off.

Facepunch has also revealed that they have been using Box3D for about a year now as well in s&box. Showcasing a cool demo

An interesting quote from the blog post:

On the Valve side, Rubikon continues to evolve and Dirk has developed optimizations (similar to those in Box3D) in a new engine called Ragnarok. Look for that in future Valve games.

👀
Did he just reveal Valve's next physics engine ?
+HL3 confirmed

Tweet transcript

I’m happy to announce the release of a new open source 3D physics engine called Box3D. I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, but it represents over 20 years of experience writing physics engines for games. Read more here: [blog post link]

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[-] popcar2@piefed.ca 12 points 4 days ago

It's really cool, Box2D is still sort of the golden standard for 2D physics engines, and maybe Box3D can be that with enough support.

But since announcement I'm still wondering what it offers versus other open source 3D physics engines. How does it compare to something like Jolt or Rapier? I only saw one person saying that Box3D is faster than Rapier when compiled to WASM, but we definitely need good comparisons at some point to know if this is a big deal or not.

[-] GreyCat@piefed.social 7 points 4 days ago

The only small comparison I have seen for now is this thread between Catto and Pierre Terdiman.

[-] Artemis_Mystique@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 days ago

for me its C over C++, and the support for crossplatform deterministic simulation

this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026

34 points (90.5% liked)

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