Is the problem here the physics?

I am creating a falling sand game in Unity, but I am running into a noob problem.

My sand gameobjects instantiate on mouseclick and fall down into the bowl. I accumulate around this many,^^^ and the game lags uncontrollably.

Part of me thinks it is the physics causing the hefty lag.


What do you think?

 

What is the sand comprised of? If you expected to create a bunch of tiny boxes that represent sand, you're crazy. That will never perform well. For liquids and fluid simulations you need to use a custom solution.

 

That's exactly what I had attempted.

 

You are likely experience lag, after few thousands of colliding boxes, like a sand case. You are better use of boid algorithms, or other spatial methods, to keep separate each entity of sand.