a few months back, your physics feature page stated that Unity 2.6.1 had the full capabilities of Aegia PhysX…which was true afaik.
…but now the page states;"Unity contains the full capabilities of the NVIDIA® PhysX® next-gen Physics Engine. "
**From what I have read, Unity 3.0 may not even have the full capabilities of Nvidia PhysX.
Do you think this is fair play ??
Why talk about a product that it’s yet to come?
And what are the supposed missing features in Unity3?
This will all be clear when the marketing director gives me a reply.
What parts of the statement "Unity contains the full capabilities of the NVIDIA® PhysX® next-gen Physics Engine " for Unity 3.0 concerns you as a falsehood?
I’m not trying to be defensive at all (I’m not part of the marketing team here)… just want to know if we’ve stated something that isn’t entirely true. When we’ve inadvertently made “over the top” claims in the past it has always come back to bite us in the ass so let’s try and clarify what the discrepancies might be.
sure,
#1. the page does not state that those features are in 3.0 or any other version. So, in laymen’s terms this includes the current version in it’s statement: 2.6.1.
#2. V3.0 is not yet released thus the physics page should ONLY state what is in the current version: 2.6.1.+. From what I have read; v3.0 may not have all of the features…so how the heck can it be advertised that 2.6.1 has them ?
#3. Nvidia PhysX has cloth, soft bodies, soft particles, liquid emitters and more. Unity does not have these features.
#4. Aegia’s PhysX is the package of which Unity 2.6.1 has the full capabilities. Nvidia has done extreme amounts of work expanding the package. The 2 packages are different to an extreme extent featurewise.
#5. Stated explicitly on the page;
"Advanced Physics
Give your GameObjects life with the built-in NVIDIA® PhysX® Physics Engine. It’s the world’s most advanced physics engine and is used in games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Mirror’s Edge.
…
NVIDIA® PhysX®
Unity contains the full capabilities of the NVIDIA® PhysX® next-gen Physics Engine."
I’m not trying to make an attack here.
I would like for you guys to avoid losing your reputation on such stupid BS. I like Unity and I think it would be sad to see your reputation fall. → Example; Garagegames used BS marketing similar to this over the recent years…and it’s currently overly-backfiring on them with T3D. Their rep is already terrible from ‘dishonesty’ and ‘hyping never existent T3D features’…don’t go that same route guys.
Please do not go that same route.
yeah i agree, please don’t follow the garage games method, they have had false advertising about their products for so long sometimes scratching the surface of fraud and that made his reputation go into free fall to the floor.
say the truth, even if it doesn’t look as shiny, even if it doesn’t seem right according to the marketing logic,because as has been said, if you start doing that, it will come back and bite you in the ass for sure. :twisted:
Unity has these features too because PhysX has them.
But unity does not expose any functionality basing on these PhysX features (and fluid emitters will never happen cause ati, nvidia and osx can’t use them due to the cuda requirement. Also Unity does not implement the version that requires the installed driver, its a driver free embedded one → no cuda support).
As such its legally not false advertisement, but end user missinterpretation.
Also at the time Unity 3.0 is not advertised at all. There was a preinformation on Unity 3.0 and there is the preorder, but thats it. All feature listings etc are Unity 2.x
I personally would prefer the opposite way of advertising the PhysX aspects though as well, that the explicit features exposed are listed and I kind of expect this to happen anyway when the features page is updated for 3.0 on 3.0s release day.
For 2.6.1 the listing is right because Unity uses a physx version that might be even older than the last Ageia version before it was bought by NVIDIAI think (the version used is 2.3x or 2.5x).
That was looong before destructables, water and alike came in as well as long before hardware acceleration came in. I think that potentially not even cloths were in then.
As such all functionalities are present (rigidbody, trimesh collision, particle system which I think is PhysX too due to the features)
Unity Technologies is not GarageGames and at least so far hasn’t required to rely on PR tricks to sell stuff thats never going to exist and all that have taken part in the Unity 3 thread or the iPhone OS 4 thread know that inside out as the counterside of that is that you will just not get any information (but thats better than information that ends up being untrue /postphoned till undefined as on TGEA - T3D. T3D isn’t bad it got many nice things not announced especially on the 1.1 beta. But there are still features which were advertised through GG lead blogs which were postphoned or “played down as examples of what could be done”)
@.eb: Thanks for bringing this concern to our attention. I assure you that it was most certainly not an attempt at deception, its more like a bug.
It was brought to my attention that our site still listed Ageia, and that the product is now known as NVidia, so I did a find and replace on Ageia and referenced two games that are much more recent and relevant than what we had on the page in 2007.
We are updating to the latest version of PhysX with Unity 3, but I’m not certain all features will be exposed (fluid?) but certainly most of the features will be. I’ll figure out what our physics page should say and update it later this week if it needs updating.
Thanks for your understanding.
I think that it’s brilliant to see you guys handle this in such a professional manner. No matter the side of your debate, you guys handled this extremely well in your replies. I am quite impressed by that.
@lion-gv; I checked on this a few months ago. You guys were ok in stating Aegia physx because that was the last version of physX that you guys had available/implemented/etc. I noticed the “Nvidia PhysX” change and it made me jump. Literally. As I know it to be untrue. Let me expand on this as dreamora gave me some great points to touch upon;
@anyone reading;
-If you follow along the lines of dreamora’s post; “end user missinterpretation”.
You may know this one;
“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
not; “a physics lib mostly uninitialized is a feature to sell”
“end user misinterpretation”…bah, never heard of a scapegoat so vague and grey.
Edit:// I am told that adding the emoticon seen below helps to ease the tension in a thread such as this…so I will add it for the sake of showing that I am not being vindictive;
Just an update: the language has been corrected to say “Unity contains the powerful NVIDIA® PhysX® next-gen Physics Engine.”. The change will go out with our next website push, Monday June 7th at around 9 am PST.
When 3.0 Ships we’ll update that page again to include Cloth, and hopefully a cooler graphic at the top 
Cloth? Nothing else? No soft bodies? 
lion-gv,
…may I ask who told you this or where you found this specific information ?
I’ll explain why in my next post.
Hello eb,
I understand your concerns. I was an early adopter of TGEA so I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Consider though, how long did it take Unity to rectify this? Contrast that with how long Garbagegames had something like “Buy TGEA now! Don’t worry Mac users, OpenGL is coming soon!” on their product pages.
There are some sections of the Unity website where you might have a better argument, where things that are well known to be horribly broken are still listed as shiny reliable features.
But PhysX? Nah, every feature they listed you get. Unlike garbagegames collisions actually work in Unity. They don’t explode the game engine under situations like penetration slower than a certain threshold. Remember the 40 page community thread trying to fix that?
I view this particular PhysX page as just being old. It still referenced the old branding! I see it like me coming across a product page saying XYZ has all the features of DirectX (With a dirextX 3.0 label) and complaining it didn’t have SM 3.0 or whatever.
In a few months, all the product webpages will be in synch with actual features. PhysX, will expose all the features of whatever current lib they build against. It will of course be outdated again the minute NVIDIA updates their lib.
Is what you are asking, that Unity update their product information every time NVIDIA updates PhysX and state in bold “We do not support the new PhysX particlemadness feature?”
Soon networking will actually work. Threading will actually thread. All your asynch objects will load in the background. Your rigidbodies will do new and fancy stuff.
TGEA on the other hand? I’d lay money that slow collisions still blow it up.
While I’ve been uncomfortable with some of the things Unity has done stemming from a certain level of lack of communication, I understand it’s just growing pains as they’re expanding incredibly fast. It’s not outright unsavory activity like garbagegames.
I still have faith in the Unitoids as people and a company.
Thanks for the input Quietus.
Lion-gv, that text change is a fruitless work of semantics.
As for my interest here…
I’m waiting on 3.0 but I have been learning with the free version when time allows. I license around a half dozen indie engines for art contracting and more. bla bla bla…
Best of luck to you guys. Thx.