> Cons: Playing with the Stress demos (especially #2) really shows the slowdowns and downsides to using a JS based engine. At 450 boxes (+ 4 bounding walls), it runs at 20fps on my Macbook and thats with a lot of jitter and overlap. Not as fun.
Have you tried enabling sleeping? Even most AAA games don't actually have even remotely close to that number of bodies active in a game at once. Sure, the engines can handle it, but having a stack of bodies like the stress demos is the absolute worst case, as you normally have to resolve a chain of contacts, in this case a few hundred, iteratively. Most physics engines also benefit hugely from multithreading, something which JS doesn't provide.
> I wish I could see a physics engine using WebGL and GPU acceleration for the web. This one is a great start if the author were to take it further and implement some of the logic with shaders.
That was tried on PC and consoles and most game developers are going back to using the CPU for physics calculation, and using the GPU for rendering. Using WebGL with this particular demo shouldn't increase the performance if the bottleneck is the physics simulation.
Have you tried enabling sleeping? Even most AAA games don't actually have even remotely close to that number of bodies active in a game at once. Sure, the engines can handle it, but having a stack of bodies like the stress demos is the absolute worst case, as you normally have to resolve a chain of contacts, in this case a few hundred, iteratively. Most physics engines also benefit hugely from multithreading, something which JS doesn't provide.
> I wish I could see a physics engine using WebGL and GPU acceleration for the web. This one is a great start if the author were to take it further and implement some of the logic with shaders.
That was tried on PC and consoles and most game developers are going back to using the CPU for physics calculation, and using the GPU for rendering. Using WebGL with this particular demo shouldn't increase the performance if the bottleneck is the physics simulation.