11 posts tagged with "new features"

Hello my friends,

for the past few weeks, I have been completely down the rabbit hole of fluid dynamics. These physics effects have recently fascinated me, and I knew I had to bring them into ScrewBox. I've read the number one paper on the topic, watched a lot of YouTube tutorials and finally got stuck with the one from The coding train. I cannot say that I really understand the underlaying math, I've only got it as long as I needed it to get it right. It really fascinates me what bugs I've created when implementing it and there are still some rough edge cases to deal with.

The system is currently used to create realistic, interactive smoke effects. The fluid dynamic system I've come up with only simulates the content on and around the screen and not the whole game world. This is due to the restriction cpu power because I wanted to provide a real-time simulation which cannot handle bigger grids at the moment. The latest version now provides a first look for this new feature which is still heavily under development and cleanup.

Currently the system is able to emit multi colored smoke and put it into motion. Also smoke can get deflected by obstacles. You can use different rendering styles to match the game graphics. There are still lots of optimizations and ideas I want to implement in the comming weeks. E.g. I could think of using the fluid system to enhance fluid graphics or create special shaders as well.

If you want to try it out please let me know any issue that you might have. More details are found in the graphics documentation.

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.

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 there! I’ve just dropped version 3.9.0. This version adds support for drawing arcs, expands the options for drawing rectangles and uses the new options to add enhanced light effects. Expanded light areas also support lens flare effects now. Looking back on some old screenshots it really makes me smile. ScrewBox graphics made a huge leap since I started in 2021.

The new version also comes with a lot of useful minor features and fixes. For all features have a look at the full changelog. I will concentrate on adding even more light effects for expanded light areas in the next version(s).

Greetings! Version 3.4.0 of ScrewBox added support for generating Perlin Noise and fractal noise. Both algorithms can be used to generate infinite deterministic landscapes and are commonly used in games like Minecraft or whenever 'procedural generation' is mentioned. The next minor version of ScrewBox will also add support for three dimensional Perlin Noise.

ScrewBox is a game engine designed for creating 2D content, so the third dimension used for generating noise will most likely be time. Nonetheless, you can also create some pseudo 3D content using these utilities, as seen in the example screenshots. The second one is a three-dimensional fractal noise which looks quite cool but doesn't add much value to the engine because it's so slow and I cannot imagine any actual use but creating nice looking blog post illustrations.

Generating noise is quite easy. Enjoy!

// 2D noise
PerlinNoise.generatePerlinNoise(seed, x, y); // value in range -1 to 1

// 3D noise
PerlinNoise.generatePerlinNoise3d(seed, x, y, z); // value in range -1 to 1

Update July 26, 2025​

After massively improving the performance of noise generation (10 times faster!) version 3.6.0 will also ship 3D Fractal Noise generation. Because, why not?