Leveraging DOTS-powered physics - Unity at GDC 2019

Hear about the journey of taking Havok's AAA physics engine from C++ to the land of C# and the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). Learn about the architecture and features now available in Unity Physics, see it in action, and learn how Unity Physics and Havok Physics can work together to maximize dynamism in your games.
Speaker: Rory Mullane (Havok)
Find out more about Unity and Havok Physics: on.unity.com/2UFvWy5

[@Clairvoyant81]

I checked out the ECS a bit and DOTS Physics yesterday and here's my biggest issue: Lack of documentation. It's kind of hard to even achieve simple things like react to a collision that occurred when you have no idea how this is achieved in the new system. Also, perhaps I just haven't found it yet, but it seems there's no way to inspect entities during game play? I used the ConvertToEntity component, my game objects disappeared, like they should, but I didn't get anything I could actually check out. is there a way to inspect Entities during play mode in the editor? I'm going to check out the examples at the URL in this video, but at least for me, I'd prefer a few overview articles and a documentation on the available components and what they do. Tutorial videos, samples, etc. are all good, but at the end of the day I need to be able to look a few things up to work effectively.

[@AEjlersen83]

When a game object is converted to Entities in ECS it disappears from the scene view. You can find them again in Entity Debugger, but the naming will be Entity 0, 1, 2, 3. You can however find entities given systems and components.

[@AEjlersen83]

And I agree with you that there is a lack of documentation. Trying to figure out the DOTS Physics myself and it is a bit annoying at times. Unity ECS is also changing a lot, so it is easy to find documentation that is already obsolete.

[@deusxyz]

Yes its something you gotta just play with. The entity debugger works, you just check a system for where your entity is. But a few examples of how to create an entity, add a collider, detect a collision, and respond to it, would be good for this package :)

[@Haapavuo]

And a year later, still the same situation

[@PhilippLenssen]

Nice thank you!

[@CrazySpin3]

Blessed :D

[@spiral9316]

I was looking for this since 2018.. only now I can find..

[@Songfugel]

9:45 oh damn, this is exactly what I have been struggling to solve to be able to delegate and scale multi-threading extra power into "background" wide-range asynchronous actor AI calculations on huge Worlds. I wish I had realized ofc the physics guys had already solved it elegantly since they have the same problem just inside a "smaller scope"

[@DerrickTheFork]

Will Havok physics be available for free?

[@batchprogrammer108]

Yep

[@DerrickTheFork]

@@batchprogrammer108 Last news I heard, Unity was in talks with Havok to see about the price. Where have they confirmed it?

[@mikeluna2026]

Would be awesome if Havok was free... but probably won't... haha...

[@MattRix]

Hi, I'm from the future. It's not free, it will be a subscription :/

[@usmanmemon]

@@MattRix free for unity personal

[@ChronoCZ]

Im at a weird point of learning Unity and C# where talks like this one ^ are too complex. While other talks are a bit too simple and beginner focused.

[@dandymcgee]

I'm at a weird point where talks like this one are too simple. It's very difficult to find good intermediate/advanced tutorials for pretty much any subject. Just stick with it and be glad that you're still at a point where some videos seem too hard, because that means you can still learn from videos. Eventually, you get into the realm of only being able to learn new things by reading very complex codebases or theoretical research papers and that's when it gets tough! Keep at it, and just search for the words you don't understand. Don't be afraid to learn concepts outside of the context of Unity either, a lot of the best tutorials aren't directly about Unity, but share many transferable concepts.

[@andrewherrera7735]

Beware of poorly documented, rushed things. Sometimes code frameworks are pure spaghetti and not worth learning. The dots framework has gotten easier to understand but they still are in a experimental stage and things may change.

[@kobilica999]

So what is "Unity Physics" here actually? It's PhysX?

[@kobilica999]

It's actually Unity Physics, to answer my own question.

[@Den-ji6ys]

On mobile platforms to?

[@spiral9316]

This presentation should have been 2 hours long

[@ethancodes7134]

Agreed. I feel like all the videos they are doing on these are very short and limited. I want to see this use in more applications. It's been very limited what they've really shown of it and the explanations are always a bit vague and short. I feel like they don't even know what's going on with it. lol.

[@superjaykramer]

DOTS WILL NOT SAVE UNITY!