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Feedback Ev4sio.Physics

Discussion in 'Assets and Asset Store' started by Ev4sio, Nov 18, 2021.

  1. Ev4sio

    Ev4sio

    Joined:
    Jul 3, 2021
    Posts:
    1
    Ev4sio is pleased to announce Ev4sio.Physics, a plugin aiming to provide advanced physics functionalities.



    Although in recent times significant efforts have been made by the Unity team to provide better access to the features of PhysX, some unused features remain, including:

    • The third party tool PhysX Visual Debugger provided by NVIDIA, which visualizes, debugs and saves a scene representation.
    • An advanced collision detection, with the option to modify or even reject contact points before they are used by the constraint solver.
    • Different types of vehicles with 4 to 20 wheels, with various engine modes and scene query sweeps for the detection of wheel collisions.
    In the video game industry, it is essential to be able to verify the validity of a point of contact during a collision before deciding whether or not to apply it.

    For example, in a racing game, you may want to check the contact points that apply to the chassis of a vehicle to make sure that those coming from the ground (because of a sidewalk, or during a landing) will not completely stop the vehicle.
    This is the kind of bug that is difficult to remove with a collision filter, because you still want your chosen collisions to the ground to happen.

    I give this type of example from experience, but I imagine it to be an essential feature using physics, whatever the type of game.

    The plugin also allows you to connect to the debugging tool provided by NVidia (PVD), which also quickly becomes essential when you start to use it.
    For now it only works with the editor, but it is already very useful in order to better understand unwanted physics behavior.

    Since this plugin fully integrates the PhysX library, with the exception of the immediate mode, rigid bodies created within it cannot collide with native Unity colliders.
    To address this issue, a button in the Scene Manager tab of the Ev4sio window allows you to convert all the static colliders of your current scene.
    To ensure the safety of your project, this operation is not destructive : No component is deleted, only new components are added to game objects.

    This plugin also exposes the vehicles present in PhysX, with all of their properties, including the ability to perform sweep queries for the positioning of the wheels.
    This feature is very useful to prevent the wheels from vibrating near a collider.

    Like in PhysX, you can set the frequency of the simulation for each object, or even for aggregate of objects.
    For example, in the demo, in order to guarantee good stability, the gravity gun requires a higher simulation frequency than the rest of the objects in the scene.

    It has many other features, the easiest way to figure out the full potential of the plugin is to consult the official NVidia documentation.
    Since I reproduced the architecture of the original library, it is possible to use this documentation to better understand how this plugin works.

    I hope you’ll like the concept and that you’ll see the benefit you could get from this type of tool.

    Since this plugin has been newly published on the store, I would be glad to get any feedback, which would undoubtedly give me ideas for the next steps of the project.

    Francis (Ev4sio)
     
    Last edited: May 5, 2022