Tinkering with Box3D + Sokol + Emscripten :)
Box3D is *fun* to work with, very simple and straightforward C API, and very configurable (this is simd + single-threaded).
New sokol-sample will be up in one or two days.
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Andre Weissflog
@floooh@mastodon.gamedev.place
mastodon 4.7.32091 Followers
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Joined November 13, 2017
Damn, @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng seriously nerd-sniped me to consider starting that home-region terrain rendering thingie that's been rolling around in my head for decades :D
E.g. I just checked what's available now for free, and there's 1x1m terrain data for download from the Saxon government. here's a random hill-shaded 2x2km tile (I just let claude cobble together a python+numpy script to 'hillshade' the data (because the tiff itself just comes out white in the macOS viewer):
My toy cycle-stepped Z80 emulator now appears to be used for proper science stuff, complete with arxiv paper and all :D
https://github.com/vicgalle/coevolution-soup
(more info https://github.com/floooh/chips/issues/119)
"LLM Policy" seems to be the new "Code of Conduct"...
Minor but important fix in sokol_imgui.h (Dear ImGui renderer backend on top of sokol_gfx.h) for Dear ImGui version 1.92.9:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#25-jul-2026
Sneak preview of the next sokol_gfx.h API update and related new test/example :)
I hope to get it out tomorrow or on Monday.
This HN comment from about a month ago certainly didn't age well ;) (was some discussion about the pendulum currently swinging back from inhouse to off-the-shelf engines)
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
Replying to
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com theming is alive and well on KDE, and directly integrated into the settings panel, and I *love* it.
https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=104&ord=rating
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...wait a sec... sleep *is* working now (when checking the 'Show sleeping' checkbox, sleeping bodies are rendered as dark grey, and once the spawning stops after 1024 bodies, everything should switch to grey after a couple of seconds, which it does now).
I didn't get that result a couple of days ago, need to actually check why...
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@zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place let's see how that statement ages, it sounds a lot like PR damage control ;)
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@SonnyBonds@mastodon.gamedev.place ...but it's the little details that are nicely done in Box3D, e.g. after ticking the physics world it allows you to quickly iterate over all bodies that have changed state (so you don't need to look at the 99% of sleeping bodies), and it's extremely easy to integrate into build systems, just a bunch of .c and .h files, and a handful configuration defines.
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@bagder @tdelmas also see: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/an-update-on-rust-coreutils/80773
...some of those CVEs are also quite embarrassing, and this is a fairly mature project, going back to at least 2019.
E.g. I wonder if some Rust programmers may suffer from an 'overconfidence syndrome' where they think that just using a memory safe language with a strong typesystem protects them from making mistakes, while C programmers learn very early to never trust the compiler ;)
Oh man, Kerbal Space Program has an 'autopilot scripting' mod, complete with retro terminal and vaguely BASIC-like programming language... as if the game isn't addictive enough already :D
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...one strange thing is that the simulation never goes fully goes to sleep after spawning has finished, need to investigate whether this is caused by the sphere bodies. Tbf though, the sample is a bit of a worst case with this big pile of shapes and tons of contact points.
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@SonnyBonds@mastodon.gamedev.place ...oh, and Box3D also does sweeping collision checks by default, e.g. no tunneling. Probably standard nowadays, but was a problem in many early physics engines. The docs page gives a pretty good overview of high level features:
https://box2d.org/documentation3d/index.html
Lol, you so funny Claude ;)
Tiny sokol_app.h fix, only relevant when building macOS apps as 'bare' executables (not wrapped in an app bundle):
https://github.com/floooh/sokol/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#01-may-2026
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@paintgoblin@dice.camp for me it's mostly interesting because it has a native C API (Jolt and Bullet3D only have official C++ APIs), it's incredibly easy to integrate into projects (just a bunch of .c and .h files), and the API is very straightforward to use.
Line count isn't actually much different from Jolt (44kloc Box3d vs 70kloc for Jolt, with Jolt having a couple more features like softbodies/cloth, hair, and looks like builtin vehicles+ragdolls)
Huh interesting, the company behind World Creator is based in Germany, pretty much a 'hidden champion' for video game production instead of industrial tools...
https://www.world-creator.com/en/index.phtml
(company page: https://www.bitethebytes.com/en/index.html)
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@MikkoMononen@mastodon.gamedev.place hmm I had to set angular damping for sphere's to stop rotating inplace (eg they kept rotating without linear movement), definitely iffy, maybe spheres were not tested as much yet dunno
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@ewerybody@mastodon.social nice :) ...reminds me that I actually need to add touch controls to the camera helper...
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@SonnyBonds@mastodon.gamedev.place I only dabbled with ODE and Bullet in the past, not Jolt. From a 10k ft view they're all quite similar, Box3D sometimes seems to be 'purer' (e.g. it doesn't seem to allow to directly set velocity on bodies, only apply impulse and force). Feature wise I'm only aware of Bullet having a builtin cloth simulation which Box3D currently lacks.
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@wolfpld @pythno @jplebreton for being written in 1992 Snow Crash nailed the "trajectory" of the US as a future failed state pretty well though. I remember that when I read it first (around 2005 maybe?) that I found that aspect of the story quite unbelievable. In the last decade or so it got a lot more believable.
But yeah, shame about Carmack.
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@jonikorpi@mastodon.gamedev.place @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place you really don't need much of a guide because it's exactly the same as regular integer math, just with an imaginary decimal point - think of "working" in meters, but with 3 fractional digits so that you actually have millimeter precision - that's fixed point math :)
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@tojiro@mastodon.social @aras@mastodon.gamedev.place the icing on the cake is that in some games the nvidia control panel will automatically override graphics settings on each game start (currently seeing this in Cyberpunk 2077) - e.g. switch off DLSS and it will be enabled again on next game start. At first I thought it's a bug in CP2077, but it's actually a 'feature' of the nvidia software which needs to be manually disabled.
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@vitaut@mastodon.social "Deflect, Deny and Disinform", Sutter must be a leftover KBG sleeper agent ;)
Hmmmmmm... what if C++ itself had been planted by the KGB to destabilize the decadent West 🤔
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@oldmankris@mastodon.xyz the problem is that LLMs produce sloppy code at a much faster rate than any human ever could hope to do ;)
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@vitaut@mastodon.social arguably C++ adds more new problems in each version than it inherited from C in the first place ;)
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@castano@mastodon.gamedev.place nice trick, I wonder if allocating two resources in the same place is a feature or a loophole ;)
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@morten_skaaning @wolfpld @pythno @jplebreton Snow Crash's Metaverse is pretty much exactly how you imagine it, a virtual space where you log into as an avatar. The interesting part is rather how the "remains" of the US is depicted.
Also important to know when 'judging' the quality of the book: it was supposed to be a comic project, which was then "salvaged" into a novel. Explains a lot of the writing style ;)
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@andrewwillmott@mastodon.gamedev.place oh, is this where the "Mach Loop" is located? Somehow I always associated the name with the Mach unit for speed heh
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@MikkoMononen@mastodon.gamedev.place ...or maybe some defaults are just 'non-intuitive'
Woah there's now a 3D version of Box2D:
https://github.com/erincatto/box3d
...and it's using sokol for the examples :)
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@MikkoMononen@mastodon.gamedev.place aaaaaha... it's the 'rollingResistance' material property, this is zero by default (probably an oversight), and that keeps spheres rolling forever... and setting this to a >0 value feels a lot less hacky than tinkering with linear and angular damping, thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
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@ahltorp @gloriouscow @goedelchen @tdelmas the cognitive load argument may apply to some gc languages, but definitely not to rust ;)
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@nightowl@mastodon.gamedev.place a separate cascaded shadow map sample would be nice! (e.g. keep the two original shadow map samples as is, because the focus there is on simplicity of the code)