cannon-es VS ammo.js

// ============ // part 2 // add base vehicle body // reference: https://github.com/pmndrs/cannon-es/blob/master/examples/rigid_vehicle.html // ============ const carBody = new CANNON.Body({ mass: 20, position: new CANNON.Vec3(0, 6, 0), shape: new CANNON.Box(new CANNON.Vec3(4, 0.5, 2)), });

cannon.js hasn't been maintained for 7-8 years, the project lives on here https://github.com/pmndrs/cannon-es you import it like so

Cannon-ES - 3D physics engine

Since I'm a big Poimandres fan I looked into react-xr, and it was very easy to get a first WebXR project up and running. Unfortunately, there are many dependencies in the ecosystem which slowed me down: react-xr is built on top of react-three-fiber which is built on top of Three.js, and physics is enabled by use-cannon which is built on top of cannon-es. For a long time I was running into issues and helping fix them with a couple of pull requests, and ultimately it was preventing me from working on the actual project. Still, Poimandres is a great community and I got a lot of inspiration from the content being shared in the discord.

This was the post I was remembering, see repo here: https://github.com/pmndrs/cannon-es

btw canon has been abandoned for years. it continues to receive support on here: https://github.com/pmndrs/cannon-es which next to bug fixes also gives it types and esm/tree-shaking.

So at the moment I’m picking up THREE.js, AFrame, and AMMO.js.

3d physics engine: Cannon.js and Ammo.js seem pretty inactive in recent years. Perhaps the boys just GOT IT DONE, and it's perfect like that. I don't know. In my search for a "more recent" development i have picked Oimo.js

Integrating physics into the scene was a challenging part. The two major javascript physics libraries seem to be ammo.js and cannon-es, and they both come with limitations. For example, with ammo.js you won't get any rolling friction and with cannon-es there are issues with compound bodies. I decided to go with ammo.js because of the latter and simulate rolling friction with linear damping.