Hands On: Our Physics Rewrite
Why we ditched a third-party physics library and what it taught us about scope.
The old library did 95% of what we needed and the remaining 5% was load-bearing for game feel. We tried wrapping it. We tried forking it. We tried convincing ourselves the 5% didn't matter. None of these worked.
The rewrite took three weeks. Most of that was getting the dispatcher right — broad-phase culling, fixed timestep, and a deterministic seed so replays work. The actual collision math was a weekend.
Worth it? Yes, but only because game feel is the thing this game lives or dies on.