Unity for flightsim

My last reply was the solution for your shudder camera zoom, not for z fighting. Agree with some FOV adjustment can help z-buffer fighting, but too much FOV is probably wrong and introduce instability to your game, also you can solve z-buffer completely with logarithmic shader only.

Hmm, those setups are practical and old school even before Unity was born, I believe you already understand those from your experience. You are in charge of your own game, not the reverse, don't let the game controls you, it's not interesting. Remember the fun when you were playing flightsim as a kid, figure out what elements were attractive to you, and be creative.

 

Smoke and mirrors is required when pushing the limits regardless of the game engine. This is not a Unity specific thing. Keep in mind that awesome game developers use smoke and mirrors to deliver amazing experiences to players. It has always been that way, even before game engines were readily available.

 

This is made in unity

 

And last I looked into it, the biggest component holding Unity back from going to 64 bit is PhysX not supporting it. Replacing PhysX is not something Unity is going to want to do.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if that were the case as we're well beyond the hardware not supporting it. What's worse though is that there isn't an alternative solution to my knowledge that has the same range of features but supports FP64. Last I checked the Havok engine had the same restriction.

 

And lets face it, great games are often all about doing something more then whatever the current tech is. We wouldn't have given two hoots about Doom if 3D rendering was already integrated into every game engine.

 

The problem is PhysX does support origin shifting in it's 3.4.0 API

Code (CSharp):

1. Shifting The Scene Origin¶
2. The following method will shift the origin of a scene by a translation vector:
3.  
4. PxScene::shiftOrigin(const PxVec3& shift)
5. The positions of all objects in the scene and the corresponding data structures will get adjusted to reflect the new origin location (basically, the shift vector will get subtracted from all object positions). The intended use pattern for this API is to shift the origin such that object positions move closer towards zero. Please note that it is the user's responsibility to keep track of the summed total origin shift and adjust all input/output to/from PhysX accordingly. Even though this method preserves some of the internally cached data, it is still an expensive operation and we recommend to use it only in the case where distance related precision issues may arise in areas far from the origin. If extension modules of PhysX are used like the character controller or vehicle library, then it will be necessary to propagate the scene shift to those modules as well. Please refer to the API documentation of these modules for details.

Docs -> https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/physx/guide/Manual/OriginShift.html

Unity does not surface this feature in it's API to my knowledge, is there a way to do this via Unity??

You could just manually origin shift things from within Unity however the performance impact of moving everything in the scene all at once might be very high especially as the physics solution likes things to be static for performance e.g. ground/terrain/buildings/trees.

This goes deep into the game engines features and how it works, that's why I think Unity should be tackling this problem head on.

Or by the time I work through all the problems to get a large world flight sim working I bet Unity would release 2019.1 with large world support!

 

Unity's stable releases are all using PhysX 3.3. Currently the only way to use PhysX 3.4 is the Unity 2018.2 beta.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/experimental-build-with-the-physx-3-4-1-upgrade.530270/

 

It's in 3.3.4 -> https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/physx/guide/3.3.4/Manual/OriginShift.html

 

You don't need to wait for Unity to support PhysX origin shifting to write your own large world flight sim. There were flight sims before PhysX. There were flight sims before 3D video cards. There were even flight sims before hardware FPU became commonplace.

A large world flight sim doesn't really rely on PhysX, anyway. Flight sims do not heavily rely on physics, and any physics that are needed can easily be faked.

 

While I definitely look forward to Unity adding support for that, this is not relevant to a discussion about building a flight simulator. A large world flight sim can be built in any modern engine (including Unity) without relying on PhysX origin shifting support.

 

Take a break, unplug yourself on vacation. Go to harbour, find a comfortable place for fishing or do nothing and listen to ocean. Hangout with friends in buffet or home party, having fun time in tennis or any sports, away from city for few days camping.

 

This amazing looking flight sim is apparently a solo project with another game engine, although that engine has origin shifting built in and large terrain support.

@UT come on Unity you know you want to go big!

 

Good news it looks like double precision vectors could be making their way into the Unity API via the new ECS Burst Math library -> https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Unity.Mathematics

Actually with this could the ECS system be a good way to make a flight or space sim, as you have to write your own physics solver for it at the moment anyway?