PhysX is actually extremely good in my experience, at least when used outside Unity. It’s *very* fast, robust and controllable. The problem is not PhysX itself, but Unity’s half-assed integration. I stopped looking at the PhysX version used in Unity some time ago, but PhysX 5.3 is open source and an absolute beast of an engine imho.
If I had any say in this matter, I’d stop beating around the bush with other engines and properly integrate one - don’t really care which. Good integration of a so-so engine is possibly better than so-so integration of the best one.
The main issues I personally had with Physx were little control over Kinematics body de-penetration and no support for rollback anti-lag compensation. No support to clone the physics world. Also, MonoBehaviours do not give you much control over the update order of the game loop, which was problematic. I am not sure what issues @Neonage is having, as he was a bit vague.
I would also like to hear from @arkano22, as he has experience with the Physx C++ API.
So in 2019 when ECS was just starting up the Havok lisence was also not included in the Unity subscriptions. This post surmises the license at that time. $20 per month per seat. So this was very early days, and inflation ect. But it would be affordable for everyone if they returned to a subscription or one time fee license.
Havok is really a lot better for stacking. Currenly using Unity Physics for my game, but I need to run 16 iterations with 1/120 delta time in order to have reasonable stability. While Havok was stable at the default 4 iterations.
So I was considering getting the pro subscription for Havok when I release my game, to get some free CPU performance + more physics stability. But now I cannot find any information about the license for 6.3 LTS. Guess I could stay at 6.0 LTS and use the Unity Pro subscription.
For starters integrate everything that’s left out which is a lot: GPU simulation, FEM deformables, PBD, collision SDFs, split substepping (decoupled collision detection / simulation), scene origin shifting, etc. What we currently got is a small subset of what the engine is actually capable of, handicapped in various ways.
At least articulations are a thing in Unity, but took quite some time for them to make their way into it.
Wow. Scene origin shifting is an important missing capability. The cost to shift rigid body positions is very expensive, to the point that it just isn’t possible in a dense open world.
Btw, we are currently looking into this bug and we will make sure that the fix does not cause a behavior change to prevent impacting users that want to upgrade to newer versions of Unity Physics.
I’m so dissappointed with this news, it’s been the single biggest feature I’ve been waiting to land for Game Object based projects, recently had my hopes it was close with the swappable physics engine feature coming soon. There’s no reality where we will ever be able to afford a license, many years of anticipation have been dashed
Yes the “$50k per Havok product” that Havok has on their site is way too much for the ECS system. I guess you could stay with Unity 6.0 LTS + Unity Pro for 2 more years and get the ECS havok included in the subscription… But I don’t really know what happens when you need to update your game after Unity 6.0 LTS is end of life. Will the havok license still stay included in Unity Pro when 6.0LTS is no longer supported?
I’ve tried to contact Havok with my company e-mail to ask if there will be any Havok Unity ECS-only license for >=6.3 LTS. But have not received any reply. I know as a solo unity dev I am not really their core audience.
I could probably live with the havok code not getting updates, if I get it all to work for my game with the current version. But I need to know I am allowed to rebuild my game if some update is needed in the future.
It depends on what platforms you plan to target, but it’s not a viable option for us to sit on an old engine version. It means we’re cut off from any future unannounced platforms or major OS / SDK revisions for existing platforms in the not too distant future. That’s a position we can’t walk into. All we can do is to wait for the swappable physics engine feature and explore the alternatives, as Havok is now not an option for the vast majority of Unity developers.
