What to do about the max. 65K colliders in a scene?

According to the Unity3D documentation:

"Note that the PhysX engine used by Unity only handles a maximum of 65536 colliders in a scene."

My problem is that I have a multiplayer (networked) game, and one scene will easily contain more colliders than that, because I let the players build objects themselves, and the scene already has a lot of collider-enabled objects like trees and such.

How should this problem be handled? Should I just surrender to the PhysX limitation and go from there, or are there ways to "cheat"?

One thing I've thought of myself, is to have trees etc. with no colliders, but have them - individually - enable their collider when another collider-enabled object is close enough.

But that won't scale; there's a chance that all the players will be close enough to another object to trigger that effect, with the unknown-ish consequences that will lead to.

Then there's the migraine-triggering idea of having several scenes, with adjacent terrains, but I don't even know where to start with that in regards to sync'ing the states of several scenes - and their players and other objects - over the network. :?

Suggestions, anyone?

Thanks!

 

If your scene has more than 65k colliders, you should rethink the way it works - PhysX limitation or not - because it would be slow as balls.

Having "collision zones" is the clear correct solution to your problem. Once every 5-10 seconds, loop through all your zones, check for a player in the zone, and switch them based on that. Better yet, spread that loop across many frames so the game doesn't stutter. There shouldn't be any especially weird, unanticipated issues with that.

Having a large world with many networked players should have "zones" anyway to be able to unload resources as you don't need them. I think the 65k collider limit will be the least of your problems in this scenario - unless your art is all based off a single texture, you're going to run out of video memory LONG before you run out of colliders.

 

Thanks for the reply, and it makes perfect sense.

Bonus question! Would you have a each player enable the colliders on objects nearby, or should the objects themselves enable their colliders if there are other collider-enabled objects nearby?

I would think the former, but you never know.

 

Anyone has an idea?

 

Did someone from Unity just necro a post?

Well, I guess we can't make fun of the newbs for it no more.

 

@AndyJenkins30 you just necro'd this post so hard we're going to have to change your username to LeeroyJenkins30.

 

Well... at least it's good to know this limit is going away.

 

Andy only has 6 posts, so still ok to pick on the newbs

Also glad to hear this limitation will be going away, not that I needed it to. One less limitation to worry about is all the better.

 

If Unity is going to PhysX 3.4, can we also get the ability to set the up vector for the Character Controller?
http://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/co...de/Manual/CharacterControllers.html#up-vector

Like my feature request here:
https://feedback.unity3d.com/sugges...-in-physx-feature-pxcontroller-setupdirection