Hello
I am trying to write a bit of code that will essentially do a physics overlap check with any mesh. I don’t plan on doing it every frame, nor will I be using complex meshes to do so (max 17 verts / 12 tris). The shape is convex. I’ve got the code running finally. The only issue I’m having now is if i set the scale of the collider’s transform before checking the cast, the new scale is ignored and it instead uses the scale from just before it was changed. I thought maybe the scale of the collider wasn’t updated until the next frame, so I put a delay of up to 3 frames after scaling to check, however sometimes it updates properly and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not sure why it has decided to scale whenever it wants, and I can’t find anything in the docs about the issue.
Physics by default doesn’t run per-frame, it runs during the fixed-update which isn’t related to frames. You could have 10 frames rendered between physics updating depending on the fixed frequency set.
Anyway, modifying a Transform doesn’t immediately change physics components as they don’t know anything about the change. Physics(2D).SyncTransforms is done once prior to the simulation running which gathers changes and performs updates. I would not recommend you calling this explicitly lots of times as it has a cost associated with it but it is a public method.
The Physics(2D).AutoSyncTransforms is off by default for this reason, it’s expensive. With this on, anytime you perform a read operation, the above transform sync happens so before every physics query or reading a rigidbody pose etc. I would not recommend this be on.
If you must scale like this then try not to do it per-frame and make all the scale changes first then wait for the simulation to run either through the FixedUpdate or manually yourself. If you must do it per-frame then do the same and either run the simulation per-frame or call SyncTransforms above once only. Still, be careful with performance there. If you make a change, call sync-transforms, make another change, call sync-transforms then be prepared for poor performance.
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Ah yes, waiting for a fixed update seems to have fixed the issue. Not sure why I didn’t try that yet.
And yes, I’m aware of the potential performance issues. I doubt the player would be able to force this to happen more than once every 5 seconds if they’re booking it, and I’m trying to keep the poly count on these casting objects extremely low. Thanks for mentioning it, though, and for going into detail.