Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a digest on gamedev tech news and articles from the week before.
S&Box is Garry's Mod spiritual successor, an open-source engine built on top of Source 2 Engine and C#.
Every other week there is an update on S&Box, so it's under quite a lot of active development. This week we have some very Garry's Mod-like improvements such as better Movie Maker keyframe splitting, but the interesting plot-twist comes with the release of Box3D physics:
Box3D is the 3D-version of the indie-darling, massively used Box2D physics engine, made by the same legend Erin Catto. The fact that it's already being used on a Game Engine with (very) tight latency and performance constraints is an amazing feat, but nothing short from the same guy that developed Box2D.
This is a brief rounds-up of Defold news from June and before. Some interesting bits we've seen in the last newsletter, but also learning content, Defold-related articles, and some free assets and extensions. Two articles I'd like to highlight is 8BitSkull on Skull Horde and Sustainable Indie Development, an interview with the indie studio 8BitSkull about their approach on developing games, and Best practices when building for the web, a Defold article that is useful regardless of the game engine you use.
Godot is releasing the first development cycle in preparation for the 4.8 version. Pre-release warnings aside, it's worth checking the feature highlights for the 4.8 version, including a Docked game view by default and TextEdit and CodeEdit touch support, which greatly improve the use-case of Godot Editor on mobile (also worth mentioning you can now create, export and publish a Godot project to Play Store using only an Android device).
I mentioned this in the S&Box update, but it's worth a bigger highlight, since we're talking about the 3D-version of probably the most used 2D physics engine of all time. Like its 2D counterpart, Box3D a highly portable C library with the following features (from the GitHub page):
Which, not surprisingly, are the same features found in Box2D GitHub page, so if you ever used Box2D before, you will feel at home with Box3D.
The official announcement for Box3D happened in a Box2D blog post, and it's totally worth checking out because it goes a bit in the architecture, similarities with Box2D, examples, and most interesting of all, where the necessity of creating Box3D came from: replacing Unreal Engine Chaos physics.
"I’ve been working on The Legend of California at Kintsugiyama since 2022. This game is built using the Unreal engine. We started with version 5.0. Our experiments with the native physics engine (called Chaos) had some problems. There was no support for simulating gyroscopic torques. This means slender shapes could spin for a long time, conserving angular velocity.
[...] Another factor is that The Legend of California needs to manage a lot of entities. Hundreds of thousands of entities exist on the server. We need a fast broad-phase for this. This is so central to our game that it seemed risky to hand this off to middleware.
[...] So we reached a pivot point with our physics tech. All these factors were adding up and I needed to make a decision: try to fix the native solution or replace it with an outside physics engine."
If this hasn't convince you to go and read it, the post also have videos with demos of Box3D, including a 25 minutes video from the creator iteself showcasing some of the features, such as recording and replaying physics simulations.
(I know, everyone is being overwhelmed by AI related news. I'll try to filter some here only when it's relevant for gamedev or a really good article about technology).
If you have any suggestions, send me feedback on Mastodon or drop an email at henriquelalves@enginesdatabase.com! And if you want to add a new game engine to the website, consider suggesting a new Game Engine.
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