LiquidFun VS Cocos2d

Compare LiquidFun vs Cocos2d and see what are their differences.

LiquidFun

2D physics engine for games (by google)

Cocos2d

Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x. (by cocos2d)
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LiquidFun Cocos2d
12 7
4,632 17,840
0.6% 0.6%
0.0 2.9
11 months ago 10 days ago
C++ C++
- MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

LiquidFun

Posts with mentions or reviews of LiquidFun. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-11-14.
  • Most Popular C[++] Open-Source Physics Engines
    9 projects | /r/gamedev | 14 Nov 2021
  • Show HN: WASM and WebGL Fluid Simulation
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2021
    Author here. This demo showcases liquidfun-wasm[0], my effort to revive liquidfun[1] (a fork which adds fluid simulation and soft-body physics to Box2D[2]).

    to make liquidfun-wasm, I repurposed my existing box2d-wasm[3] and pointed it at a different release of Box2D — a commit obtained by rebasing liquidfun over 7 years of upstream Box2D changes[4]. the end result is that liquidfun is now distributed in WebAssembly and with TypeScript typings for the first time. The TypeScript typings are generated from WebIDL bindings via my webidl-to-ts[5] compiler.

    this demo in particular aims to bring to the Web the shaders from the liquidfun EyeCandy demo[6], and show how fast JS can run if you avoid incurring the garbage collector (the main loop tries not to allocate objects). the demo repurposes gravity and drag calculations that I'd used previously in my Lunar Survey experiment[7] (a Mario Galaxy homage).

    [0] https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm/releases/tag/liquidf...

    [1] http://google.github.io/liquidfun/

    [2] https://github.com/erincatto/box2d

    [3] https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm

    [4] https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm/releases/tag/v4.0.0-...

    [5] https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm/tree/master/webidl-t...

    [6] https://github.com/google/liquidfun/blob/master/liquidfun/Bo...

    [7] https://birchlabs.co.uk/lunar-survey/

    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2021
    Liquidfun [0] diverged from Box2D at v2.3.0, circa November 2013.

    liquidfun-wasm [1] is my effort to rebase the liquidfun contributions onto latest Box2D, v2.4.1 (October 2020), and to distribute it in WebAssembly with TypeScript typings.

    this work is detailed in liquidfun-wasm's first release notes. [2]

    I've also enabled WASM SIMD acceleration (via LLVM's autovectorizer) on supported devices. Haven't yet measured what performance difference this makes.

    [0] http://google.github.io/liquidfun/

    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2021
    yeah, I've played around with a few approaches for running the timestep and for some reason I don't feel like I get the same results as liquidfun.js.

    their loop [0] is pretty simple; it's scheduled by `requestAnimationFrame`, advances time by 1/60th of a second, and runs their default of 3 particle iterations. it completes the physics simulation within 3.9–5.5ms, which is easily in time for the 16ms deadline. the rendering is WebGL, which I assume fits easily into that 16ms budget too.

    my loop [1] is more complicated; I don't hardcode the timestep to 1/60 seconds, because requestAnimationFrame may be scheduled less frequently than that. so instead I advance time by the time elasped since I was last scheduled. hm, I think there's a mistake there — `lastMs = nowMs` is probably on the wrong side of the physics calculation.

    there's an additional technique I use: I put a `Math.min()` over the simulation interval, so that I don't attempt to simulate more than 20ms (this can happen if you get scheduled infrequently due to hot CPU or backgrounding the app) — simulating too much time will make us fail our frame deadline anyway.

    furthermore, if we are calculating more than 1/60th of a second, I employ more particle iterations (i.e. 3 particle iterations for every 1/60th of a second that passes). this gave me good results, but turns out it is based on incorrect assumptions (iterations are unrelated to timestep)[3]. moreover, I may be making mistakes in my decision of whether to round this fraction up/down.

    if too few particle iterations for a timestep: the particles will bounce. if too many: the particles will look too incompressible[4]. I think that's the "solid-like" structure you're describing.

    the main reason I complicated this is because the last one I did[5] made me feel motion-sick. I think if "every 1/60th, or 1/30th, or 1/20th of a second: you simulate a 1/60th of a second of time": the result (if you're not scheduled consistently) is that the world speed keeps changing. I think liquidfun.js's approach should be vulnerable to this, but for some reason it looks fine to me. maybe they get scheduled more consistently than me (even though by my measurements, my physics runs slightly faster, so should be able to achieve similar results).

    I think I need to remind myself of what happens if I program the timestep in the simple way that liquidfun.js did. will try that out at some point.

    [0] https://github.com/google/liquidfun/blob/master/liquidfun/Bo...

    [1] https://github.com/Birch-san/liquidfun-play-2/blob/master/sr...

    [2] https://github.com/Birch-san/liquidfun-play-2/blob/master/sr...

    [3] http://google.github.io/liquidfun/Programmers-Guide/html/md_...

    [4] http://google.github.io/liquidfun/Programmers-Guide/html/md_...

    [5] https://birchlabs.co.uk/box2d-wasm-liquidfun/

    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2021
    yes, I compiled with -msimd128 to enable LLVM's auto-vectorization. I distribute both SIMD and non-SIMD, and the entrypoint picks whichever distribution your browser supports. for box2d-wasm, SIMD acceleration resulted in a 0.6–0.9% performance boost [0] when simulating a pyramid of boxes.

    liquidfun-wasm is a fork with additional algorithms for performantly simulating particles. I have not yet built a benchmark to measure the particle code, but do intend to. I am optimistic that liquidfun's particle code could auto-vectorize better than the general Box2D code.

    the Google engineers considered how to take advantage of SIMD, to the extent that they even ship a NEON SIMD algorithm[1]. I don't believe my compiler config will use that NEON algorithm (and will instead fallback to the general algorithm [2]). that's probably not a missed opportunity; many NEON features are not supported[3]. but since the engineers were thinking about SIMD, hopefully the non-NEON algorithm will try to make good use of the CPU and memory layout too, and auto-vectorize well.

    [0] https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d.ts/pull/1

    [1] https://github.com/google/liquidfun/blob/master/liquidfun/Bo...

    [2] https://github.com/google/liquidfun/blob/master/liquidfun/Bo...

    [3] https://emscripten.org/docs/porting/simd.html#compiling-simd...

  • [AskJS] How could I implement realistic fluids simulations (SPH?) in my video game?
    3 projects | /r/javascript | 9 Mar 2021
    It should be possible to produce simulations like the ones they produced in JS: http://google.github.io/liquidfun/
  • Hello!
    2 projects | /r/oeCake | 19 Jan 2021
    He was involved in an open-source project titled LiquidFun, which was released late in 2013 and unfortunately only went through 3 versions, ending developmentin mid 2014. https://github.com/google/liquidfun/releases

Cocos2d

Posts with mentions or reviews of Cocos2d. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-11.
  • Not only Unity...
    53 projects | /r/opensourcegames | 11 Nov 2023
  • Decrypt key and signature
    3 projects | /r/AskReverseEngineering | 12 Apr 2023
    That's all I can really tell you from what you've posted. The original version without the Blowfish encryption is open source (eg. https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x/blob/v4/cocos/scripting/lua-bindings/manual/CCLuaStack.cpp) , and I don't really understand how why you have so much symbol information available if what you're trying to disassemble isn't also probably open source
    3 projects | /r/AskReverseEngineering | 12 Apr 2023
  • How does writing shader source code work for OpenGL ES?
    2 projects | /r/opengl | 14 Mar 2022
    As others have pointed out, the biggest difference you're seeing is likely due to the _version_ of OpenGL (and hence GLSL) version. That said, there are still important differences. I'd recommend looking at a comparison between the same shader in a project that supports both OpenGL & OpenGLES. For example, here's a shader from cocos2d-x https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x/blob/v4/cocos/renderer/shaders/positionColor.vert. Note the only difference in this case is the additional precision qualifier (lowp) for v_fragmentColor. Note too how cocos uses preprocessor macros to handle this, so they don't have to maintain separate shader sources. Depending on your goals, you might be interested in tools like Nvidia cg or nvFX that allow for creating shaders in a dialect agnostic way, but ymmv.
  • Im learning C++ and want to make a small game with it. What do you suggest me for graphics?
    6 projects | /r/gamedev | 20 Nov 2021

What are some alternatives?

When comparing LiquidFun and Cocos2d you can also consider the following projects:

Pygame - 🐍🎮 pygame (the library) is a Free and Open Source python programming language library for making multimedia applications like games built on top of the excellent SDL library. C, Python, Native, OpenGL.

Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

Panda3D - Powerful, mature open-source cross-platform game engine for Python and C++, developed by Disney and CMU

Arcade - Easy to use Python library for creating 2D arcade games.

Box2D - Box2D is a 2D physics engine for games

libGDX - Desktop/Android/HTML5/iOS Java game development framework

RenPy - The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine

Oxygine - Oxygine is C++ engine and framework for 2D games on iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and Mac

Spring RTS game engine - A powerful free cross-platform RTS game engine. - Report issues at https://springrts.com/mantis/

PySDL2

Allegro - The official Allegro 5 git repository. Pull requests welcome!