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Will Unity3D also be using APEX ?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Jeffmaliboe, Jan 9, 2011.

  1. Jeffmaliboe

    Jeffmaliboe

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    Hi,
    As you all know NVidia will be releasing APEX to the public very soon.
    Will Unity3D be using APEX in a future version ?
     
  2. mikesgames

    mikesgames

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    I would like to see it. APEX looks quite interesting
     
  3. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    There were no plans mentioend for it and I seriously doubt it unless EA or another million USD customer makes it a "do or die" condition for them to use Unity. We don't even have softbody integration yet which was there in PhysX for years and APEX would be 2 worlds higher. Also already the collision export possibility from professional tools to prevent unity from generating them at startup etc was denied in the past from what I recall, although I'm sure that this among other physic integration considerations are being in reevaluation as that end is lacking considerably for an engine that release a new major version in Q4 2010.
     
    Last edited: Jan 9, 2011
  4. jonas-echterhoff

    jonas-echterhoff

    Unity Technologies

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    AFAIK, APEX does not really extend the core PhysX engine capabilities anyhow. Instead, it provides an authoring pipeline for physical content, in some parts duplicating what we have in the Unity editor. I would think it makes much more sense to rely on our editor for physics authoring (and extend on that as we extend physics capabilities), as it can provide better integration, and tools which will run on both mac and windows.

    Of course, this does not rule out adding support for the APEX pipeline, like we support other external content tools, but I don't currently see a big use case for it in Unity.
     
  5. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    I know and I agree, having it all right in Unity is better.
    The question is always: Will UT be able to push in the required work force to make the time to market for the tools be acceptable. APEX is there already and its working, Unity at the time does not even expose most of what would be there and still needs to expose this control to the developers, write docs for it etc and that for functionality potentially only a minority needs, a minority that likely would be able to use APEX
     
  6. Vert

    Vert

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    That's a very nice and detailed explanation of Physx and Apex, Sinan. I too love physics and think that the more in games the better. I would love to be able to use those tools to make destructible environments. A few clicks in a few minutes instead of hours remodeling and texturing for dynamic destruction ?! I don't know who wouldn't want that!

    I too hope that Unity devs can integrate high end physics into Unity.

    The neat thing about APEX is that it works with the Physx system that is already integrated into Unity and is cross-platform for Windows, Mac and even Linux.
     
  7. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    I found the current physics tools/features in Unity really unusable, specially the skinnedcloth, not solid at all. Every time you hit play and stop, you must reselect each vertex again (instead of keeping a track of which vertex you previously selected) which make the tool simply a nono for a real case scenario, a game. Also, the behavior of skinned cloth is unrealistic, weird and pretty bad. I hope Unity will improve those tools a bit more and perhaps why not support Apex in the future?
     
  8. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Because APEX is not unity inbuilt and NVIDIA likely also has no interest to change that :)

    The primary thing Unity needs is full multithreaded PhysX, so it makes sense to raise more work on clothes. With the current setup its really running at a border where it can become a major problem within the blink of an eye
     
  9. AcidArrow

    AcidArrow

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    I will settle for better and more complete integration of physx and then we can talk about apex...
     
  10. Vert

    Vert

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    I just want to be able to use the program to procedurally break my models to make them destructible. That would save me hours and hours of work. That's really all I want from Apex.