Lighting defines the atmosphere of a game. While ScrewBox is still struggling with colored lights, it is now possible to use indirect light. This new feature is enabled by default comming with 3.30.0. Under the hood, the engine casts 180 rays around each visible spot light to calculate the bounces (and child bounces). Consequently, all spotlights and cone lights create realistic indirect light when hitting occluders, illuminating adjacent walls. This adds some visual depth to the environment.

Because all light sources in ScrewBox are dynamic, these raycasts and light bounces update constantly as the sources move. There are new configuration options to turn off indirect light or customize it further. For instance, the maximum number of bounces can be limited via the graphics configuration.

However, adding indirect light can be costly. In my playground scene, this heavy raycasting reduced the framerate by at least 20 percent when running uncapped. Despite the performance hit, I think it is absolutely worth it.

For more details please consider the graphics documentation.

Hi there,

starting from 3.29.0 ScrewBox will no longer require any transitive dependency. Previous versions of ScrewBox relied on Jackson to deal with Tiles Map editor maps and tilesets. This reduces the total amount of storage for the engine from 2.1 to 1.5mb. ScrewBox is now officially just one floppy disk away from fitting into your retro build!

ScrewBox 3.26.0 uses the newly implemented post processing effects to create much better scene transitions. Transitions can now use the current screen image as input instead of simply drawing on top of the screen. I have replaced all the old animations with a bunch of new ones. This is a screenshot for the new CameraLensAnimation which can be used for intro and outro animations:

This version also adds the SoftBodyBoundaryComponent which finally adds enhanced collision avoidance between the softbody outline and the landscape.

Hi everyone,

version 3.24.0 introduces Post-Processing to ScrewBox.

What is Post-Processing? Instead of rendering directly to the screen, the engine now renders the scene into a buffer first. The render pipeline then apply on ore more visual filters to that image before it is presented at the actual screen. The current release includes several built-in filters: Shockwave, Wave, DeepSea, Underwater, FishEye, FacetEye, HeatHaze and Warp

You can implement your own filters to modify the game's appearance. While filters can be stacked, please note that some effects have a significant performance impact, which may limit the number of active layers depending on your hardware.

The Shockwave Post-Processing filter functions differently than standard global filters. These effects are anchored within the game world and account for camera movement, with radius and width changing over time. To handle this complexity, ScrewBox provides a specialized API that allows you to trigger shockwaves with a single line of code. The underlying filter is managed and applied internally on demand.

postProcessing.triggerShockwave(playerPosition, ShockwaveOptions.radius(40));

I'm planning to add some more support for such game world dependent effects in the future. Also there are more post filters to come with the next versions.

Have a nice day!

Hello everyone,

the last three versions of ScrewBox made a huge effort to improve the game illumination:

The overall performance was improved significantly by improving the speed of the internally used image filters and algorithms. The blurring filter is now 20-30% faster and supports higher blur values for even smoother visuals. The time consumed for image opacity inversion was reduced by a staggering 98%.

This increased throughput allows for higher-quality shadow maps and heavier shadow blurring without sacrificing frame rates.

I have also introduced a new directional light source and backdrop occluders:

• Directional light easily simulate natural illumination like sunlight.
• Backdrop occluders create shadows directly on the background behind objects. Backdrop occluders work in perfect harmony with soft physics entities. The shadows add a new level of immersion to these entities.

Hello there,

the first update of 2026 adds dynamic cloth soft bodies. Cloth soft bodies support a new mesh shader rendering algorithm to create some 3D like optics. Cloth rendering also supports (animated) textures. I've uploaded a short demo for the new feature on Youtube.

As the creation of soft bodies gets more and more complex, the new SoftPhysicsSupport is here to help you. The class can create all kinds of soft bodies with a single line of code. Also there is some support to make customizing easier. The soft physics guide is a good place to start if you want to learn more.

Hi there,

the last big contribution to ScrewBox in 2025 is in. The current version will finalize three major updates to the soft body physics.

1. Soft bodies now support collisions using point in polygon and bisector intrusion algorithm. So your soft bodies now can interact with each other quite nicely.
2. The shape of the soft body can now be preserved using shape matching. This will prevent collapsing of the original shape and will be essential when using more complex shapes.
3. Pressure can be applied to soft bodies. So you can blow them up like balloons, because why not?

I have updated the soft physics guide accordingly.

Greetings,

the next minor release of ScrewBox will introduce soft physics. The new components will allow creation of ropes and soft structures. Both will be build of entity clusters and will therefore support mixing with existing components.

I have just finished the foundation (linking entities, rendering smooth curves). The next steps will introduce a nice api for easy creation of entity clusters building soft bodies. Currently this is purely manual and leads to a lot of clutter code.

Want to learn how to use? Have a look at the soft physics guide.

Hey everyone,

A few days ago, I watched a YouTube video on pixel snapping effects in 2D games, which are even present in highly popular games. I was curious if ScrewBox also suffers from these issues. Upon closer inspection, I noticed some strange effects on the edges of the game window. The effects were rarely visible and I didn't notice them before because they only appeare next to the screen edges.

After investigating for a few hours, I identified the error as the metal render on MacOs. However, I couldn’t find any workaround other than switching to OpenGL rendering, which is significantly slower on Mac because it’s outdated.

I shared this Java bug with a colleague, and she expressed indifference if it wasn’t officially reported. Of course, she was right, so I invested a few more hours to report the bug, which was reviewed and now is officially accepted as JDK-8371679.

So you could say I found a genuine edge case bug in the JDK.😏

Hey everyone,

in the past, ScrewBox had some very restrictive limitations due to the architecture decisions I made, both consciously and unconsciously. For instance, I never considered implementing a split-screen mode within the existing code base. However, it was possible, but it was a significant challenge to rewrite hundreds of lines of code. After at least three months of work, finally getting it done felt like a huge success.

The upcoming version 3.14.0 will finally address another restriction that had been bothering me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound particularly exciting: Now, it’s possible to draw entities in any order across all entity systems. This allows for some nice refactorings within the engine, which results in slight performance improvements. However, it also provides much more freedom when creating games with ScrewBox.

// will be drawn second
canvas.drawLine(line, LineDrawOptions.color(RED).drawOrder(2));

// will be drawn first
canvas.drawLine(line, LineDrawOptions.color(RED).drawOrder(1));

// will be drawn above the light
int aboveLight = Order.PRESENTATION_LIGHT.mixinDrawOrder(1);
canvas.drawLine(line, LineDrawOptions.color(RED).drawOrder(aboveLight));