Flit
Flit is a tiny little physics engine for 3js. It doesn't do much yet! but I believe!
Spheres, gravity, and a spatial-hash broadphase — nothing more, on purpose.
All simulation state lives in flat Float32Arrays (structure-of-arrays), so
the CPU path doubles as the reference implementation for a future WebGPU
compute backend: same buffers, same kernels, no re-architecting.
What's in the box
World — point-sphere particles, semi-implicit Euler integration,
impulse + positional-correction contact solver, infinite ground plane.
SpatialHash — uniform grid broadphase keyed by Morton (Z-order)
cell codes. This is the Euclidean cousin in the LSH family: MinHash
buckets documents by Jaccard similarity; this buckets positions so
nearby points collide in the same bucket. Morton keys are bijective
(no hash-collision pair bloat), invertible (no side table), and
locality-ordered for a future sorted-array GPU backend.
- Distance & bit utilities — squared Euclidean/L1/Minkowski/L∞/Hellinger/
chi-square/KL distances (ported from FLANN), Morton (Z-order) keys,
float bit-flips for radix sorting, octagonal approximate distance.
See
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for provenance and licenses.
For agents
Building a little three.js game or demo? Two ways in:
- Skill:
skills/flit/SKILL.md — copy the skills/flit/ directory into
your agent's skills path (e.g. .claude/skills/, ~/.code_puppy/skills/).
It carries the 30-second integration recipe, the MCP option, measured
performance envelope, and contributor rules.
- MCP server (no code needed):
npm run mcp, or point your client at it:
{
"mcpServers": {
"flit": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["vite-node", "mcp/server.ts"],
"cwd": "<path-to-this-repo>"
}
}
}
Tools: flit_info, flit_reset, flit_spawn (rain/explosion/grid/fountain
presets), flit_add_particles, flit_step, flit_state — the last two
return flat xyz positions shaped for InstancedMesh syncing.
Usage
npm i flit-physics
import { World } from 'flit-physics';
const world = new World({ restitution: 0.4 });
const ball = world.addParticle({ position: [0, 10, 0], radius: 0.5, mass: 1 });
world.step(1 / 60);
mesh.position.set(
world.positions[ball * 3],
world.positions[ball * 3 + 1],
world.positions[ball * 3 + 2],
);
Develop
npm install
npm test
npm run build
npm run bench
npm run demo
Benchmarks
Deterministic seeds; numbers from a local dev machine, recorded at commit
time (see commit messages for the full series, including rejected designs).
bench/broadphase.bench.ts — broadphase only, N=4096:
xor-hash 3.4–3.7 ms (444 pairs, ~90% collision bloat) → Morton keys
with ordered probing 3.5–3.7 ms (234 pairs, exact).
bench/world.bench.ts — full World.step, N=1024:
xor-hash 0.85 ms/step → Morton ordered-probing 0.83 ms/step →
0.93 ms/step with the sequential-impulse velocity solver
(4 iterations + LUT friction). Exact keys, real contacts, +11%.
bench/scaling.bench.ts — two regimes, and one important caveat.
Fixed box (density rises): pairs scale ~N² from crowding physics.
Scaled box (constant spawn density): flat O(N) ≈ 1.2 ms per 1000
through N=8000 — but only while bodies are scattered. The
caveat: with gravity on, everything rains into a dense floor pile
over ~2-4s (WARMUP=240 to reproduce), and steady-state piles are
contact-solver dominated: ~4.3 ms per 1000 at N=8000 (87k contacts
x 4 iterations), putting the 60fps pile budget near 3k bodies.
The known fix for piles is island sleeping / agglomeration — parked.
bench/morton-libs.bench.ts — codec bake-off vs npm libs
(npm run bench:libs): ours 3.8 ns/encode, fast-morton MB 26.1,
fast-morton LUT 43.8, @thi.ng/morton 539.9. In-house wins; the libs
stay as devDependencies purely so the bake-off stays runnable.
- Rejected on measurement (see commits): 63-bit BigInt keys (13× alloc
regression); sorted-array + binary-search broadphase (1.4× slower
than Map probing in JS — negative result recorded).
Roadmap
Morton-ordered broadphase cells — done, measured, shipped
three.js demo scene — npm run demo, 220 balls in a box
- Open issue: settled-pile solver cost — see
docs/issues/001-settled-pile-performance.md
(self-contained brief with repro, evidence, and definition of done;
suitable for an agent or human to pick up)
- WebGPU compute backend once the CPU reference settles
License
MIT — see LICENSE. Third-party portions and their licenses are listed in
THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.