box2d-wasm VS PixiJS

https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm.) Godot uses box2d, too, so that would be convenient, if I switch to godot, but only if it is worth the performance improvement, which it currently does not seem to be. Maybe next year.

Following the article, you build a simple 2D physic simulation (only for balls). Did by chance anyone expand on that to include boxes, or know of a different approach to build a physic engine in WebGPU?

I experiemented a bit with it and imolemented raycasting, but it is really not trivial getting the data in and out. (Limiting it to boxes and circles would satisfy my use case and seems doable, but getting polygons would be very hard, as then you have a dynamic size of their edges to account for and that gives me headache)

3D physic engine on the GPU would be the obvious dream goal to get maximum performance, but that is really not an easy thing to do.

Right now I am using a Box2D for wasm and it has good performance, but it could be better.

https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm

The main problem with all this is the overhead of getting data into the gpu and back. Once it is on the gpu it is amazingly fast. But the back and forth can really make your framerates drop - so to make it worth it, most of the simulation data has to remain on the gpu and you only put small chanks of data that have changed in and out. And ideally render it all on the gpu in the next step.

(The performance bottleneck of this simulation is exactly that, it gets simulated on the gpu, then retrieved and drawn with the normal canvasAPI which is slow)

box2dwasm - an old, still maintained C++ library compiled to WASM. The documentation is lacking and developer experience seems poor.

network inspector says 2.1MB. but that's dominated by a 1.3MB image.

the main assets of the library are:

- Box2D.simd.js (422kB)

- Box2D.simd.wasm (266 kB)

a minimal demo that uses the library can be created in just a few kB:

https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm/tree/master/demo/mod...

A couple weeks ago I ported liquidfun to TypeScript + WebAssembly: https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm/releases/tag/v4.0.0-liquidfun.0

If you're into video game dev, then PixiJS is something you need to know about. It's a HTML5 game engine that provides a lightweight 2D library across all devices. This latest update has a new package structure, custom builds, graphics API overhaul, and lots more. You can read about all these changes in the PixiJS Migration Guide. Also big congrats to PixiJS for being part of the open source community for ten years now! 😮.

6. Pixi.js

https://pixijs.com/ and https://gsap.com/. All of the source code for my posts can be found at https://github.com/samwho/visualisations :)

For full web games (yeah, I come from the web, so I try to make my family proud), I will recommend PixiJS. It has great support for TypeScript and works very well with Vite. It's lighter than other game engines, so it's better for web games. But you will need to do a lot of things by yourself.

PixiJS (MIT/TypeScript) https://github.com/pixijs/pixijs

That approach works well for what I was trying to archive but I am planning on adding more functionality into the website. Hence in this article, let me rebuild the project using Pixi.js and it’s React binding, React Pixi.

https://openarena.live/

There's also a bunch of Javascript game engines: https://github.com/collections/javascript-game-engines

Of those, BabylonJS seems pretty powerful for 3D: https://www.babylonjs.com/games/

Or PixiJS for 2D: https://pixijs.com/

https://pixijs.com/ is more of a 2D rendering framework, but powerful and very fast