If anybody is interested in seeing an optimized implementation of the current cloth system, I have a cloth physics example in this asset:
If somebody is not familiar with the current cloth system and want to explore a practical usage/example, let me know I can give you give a free voucher. First come, first serve. PM me as to not clutter this thread please.
I humbly ask you to consider looking at my implementation before throwing the whole thing in the bin. I ask this most genuinely because if the existing cloth system is deprecated, that’s going create at least a month of unpaid work for my massive in-house building interiors library. I respect the opinions of others, but that would be pretty demoralizing to do all that work when it currently works pretty well for 90% of use cases.
I do think there are some cool potential uses of entities for cloth physics:
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thousands of banners / flags carried by soldiers in a medieval army (also their capes and clothes). This could useful for not just gaming, but also film/tv.
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fashion design industry applications with catalogues of thousands of clothing or parts. Could also be used for ultra detailed small games or point of interest buildings like clothing stores, dry cleaners, modeling agencies, etc.
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Large throne room or banquet hall scenes with thousands of cloth parts in extreme detail like every single napkin, chair cover, drape, table cloth, and tapestries are interactable. This would be a really smooth next-gen level of polish.
To be fair, some if not most of these things, can be optimized with the right approach using the current system though with things like skinned mesh combining, setActive triggers of the camera layer, per layer camera culling and in the largest scale worlds, additive scene loading and unloading…mostly with very simple boilerplate Unity API code.
Edit: Additional uses of cloth include hair, ropes, and chains.