GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Optimizing Continuous Physics in Box2D
Erin Catto (Technical Fellow, Unannounced Studio)
Location: Room 3001, West Hall
Date: Thursday, March 20
Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Programming
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
Box2D is a game physics engine that has been in development for almost 20 years. It has been a successful open source project and used in many games and game engines. It has also been a platform for experimenting with many different algorithms and optimizations in game physics. Continuous collision has always been a challenging problem. Ideally colliding objects never pass through each other. However, this is a hard problem that is constrained by accuracy and performance. This talk will review some of the many approaches to continuous collision and resolution and present a promising hybrid approach that has recently been implemented in Box2D.
Takeaway
Participants will learn about advances in continuous collision detection and response in game physics. These techniques are useful in 2D and 3D games.
Intended Audience
This talk is aimed at game programmers with basic knowledge of game physics and physics engines. Some prior knowledge of collision detection will be useful, but references will be provided for further study.