Hi, everyone! I’m Ashley, product manager for Physics and DOTS Entities at Unity.
We recently shared roadmap updates for DOTS and Physics over on the main ECS forum, but I wanted to make sure to highlight the physics updates here for you all. While the Physics team is part of Unity’s Data-Oriented Tech Stack (DOTS) group, we take care of most physics-related features – including the 3D physics integration (PhysX) and the physics options for projects using DOTS: Unity Physics and Havok Physics.
What’s New
In short, we’ve released several updates and bug fixes over the past year for Unity Physics, and you’ll be able to benefit from them all in Unity 6 Preview. These updates include:
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An improved Collider Inspector and new functions/components to make it easier to analyze, interact with, edit, and uniformly scale physics colliders at runtime.
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User experience improvements like better ragdoll and joint behavior, improved debug displays, and more.
Catch the full details about these updates over on the Unity Physics changelog.
Physics Roadmap
Our roadmap remains stable and on-track for the coming year as we continue to invest in the following areas:
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All physics users: We’re developing a unified authoring workflow that will allow you to select your preferred physics backend via the Project Settings. Game productions can be unpredictable and sometimes need a different physics engine than what they started with. The need to change backends shouldn’t occur often, but productions have been finding it cumbersome when it does. With this workflow, you’ll be able to switch to the backend you need without having to redo your project.
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All physics users: As part of streamlining our physics workflows, we are considering the deprecation of Unity Cloth in a future version of Unity. If your studio/company is using Cloth, please let us know in the comments so we can get in touch about your experience with the feature.
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DOTS physics users: A new update to the Unity Physics broadphase is being worked on. You’ll be able to change it to operate incrementally using the PhysicsStepAuthoring component (see parameters Incremental Dynamic Broadphase and Incremental Static Broadphase), and the PhysicsStep Entities components. When the feature is enabled, the bounding volume hierarchy inside the broadphase – used for spatial acceleration during collision detection and for collider queries such as ray and collider casts – is no longer built from scratch every frame, but incrementally updated from one frame to the next. This can lead to drastic performance improvements for scenes with large numbers of rigid bodies of which only a very small subset changes between frames. Changes to rigid body transformations or colliders are rare. This feature can be enabled for dynamic bodies and static bodies separately, which makes it applicable to large and mostly static worlds with massive numbers of static rigid bodies and a reasonable number of dynamic bodies. By default, this feature will be disabled.
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DOTS physics users: Also coming up for Unity Physics is a new Collider.BakeTransform function that provides the ability to arbitrarily scale or otherwise transform any collider at runtime efficiently. There will also be a new CompoundCollider.Update function that will allow modifying the shape or transformation of child colliders within a compound collider without having to recreate the entire compound collider from scratch. This will greatly reduce computation time for these dynamic collider cases.
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DOTS physics users: Additionally, spring and damping parameters for motors are now supported for custom components through baking, and in the Unity Physics API and custom components. This allows you to tweak how a motor moves to reach its target. Use damping to adjust how much overshoot a motor may have when approaching a target, and use the spring parameter to adjust how bouncy it is.
Help us with your feedback!
We’ve been receiving amazing feedback from the community both online and at events like GDC 2024. Know that we are carefully reviewing your input as always for consideration towards our roadmap.
The best way to ensure your feedback is heard is by submitting and voting on ideas within our public roadmap page for DOTS and Physics. Each card on the page can be clicked on to see details and voting options, and all feedback shared here is directly routed to the proper product teams. If you don’t see a card for a topic you’d like to share feedback on: select the “Didn’t find what you were looking for?” card, choose the level of importance for your feedback, and use the text field that pops up afterwards to let us know what’s on your mind.
In particular, we’d need your input on the following:
As mentioned above, we are considering the deprecation of Unity Cloth. If your studio/company is using Cloth – or if you decided to make your own cloth solution – please let us know in the comments! We’d love to learn more about your experience and possibly get in touch to understand the details.
Thank you!
We’re excited to hear more from you as you learn and work with physics in Unity! Keep us posted on your physics creations, questions, and thoughts here in this thread / forum, the DOTS/Physics roadmap portal, or over on the DOTS/Physics channels of Unity’s Official Discord. Until next time!
- Ashley