In the coming weeks, Adaptive Timestepping is planning to be Enabled for the Default stepping method in Workspace.PhysicsSteppingMethod. That said, we will not be acting until we hear from you and ensure this does not negatively impact your experiences or workflow.
We are aware of the concerns raised previously about this change, so we’ve made several improvements to increase the stability of legacy BodyMovers and servo motors. Additionally, we’ve fine-tuned the system’s behavior concerning humanoids to be more conservative, ensuring a more stable experience for characters, and Mechanisms will choose timesteps more carefully for stable simulations as well.
Other additional improvements include:
Less time spent doing unnecessary physics simulations. Therefore your experience can focus on mission-critical in-game logic instead of physics performance.
Upcoming physics performance upgrades will be better utilized and will future-proof your experiences.
A lot of effort has been put into ensuring your experience stays mostly unchanged. Yet, there might be minor variations in physics behavior, particularly in the stability characteristics when mechanisms (constraints) directly interact with legacy humanoids. If instability arises under these specific conditions, Fixed is recommended as your fallback.
If you prefer not to use Adaptive Timestepping, you can always set your PhysicsSteppingMethod to Fixed.
We’d love for you to test out this new feature! Your input is valuable, and we want to ensure the change results in reasonable behavior for all projects. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
As always, thank you for your support and dedication to our platform. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we continue to improve physics performance for everyone.
We’ve been using this in our experience, Pinewood Computer Core, which is extremely heavy on physics parts as a core gameplay mechanic. Things like cargo, trains, fires, core systems, and other vehicles rely on the physics system heavily.
We have been using adaptive since June 5th. While it has drastically improved our server physics performance, we’ve noticed some occasional issues with characters, specifically a “spasm” that seems to happen randomly when walking around normally.
Here’s a video showcasing that from a bug report we’ve received.
I’m surprised humanoid-based assemblies are affected; I would assume they would have switched back to using a fixed timestep.
The problem with characters climbing through parts is also still present as seen in Plasmacticus’s Repro, but it seems to be rarer as I only got to replicate it 3 out of 10 tries.
Only thing that’s currently stopping us from using Adaptive Timestepping is a weird issue we are experiencing with Gravity Coils in our game where it makes the players humanoid/camera sort of jittery.
We tried to add this to our experience, Flooded Area, a few months ago, but it led to issues with boat stability and flinging. (our entire game is physics based and relies on BodyMovers unfortunately) While it did improve performance by a huge margin, it caused too many issues, so we switched back to Fixed.
With the improvements to BodyMovers, this may finally be a viable solution! It does appear parts are still flinging more often than usual, and boats can be a bit jittery at times, but maybe that’s just the price that has to be paid. I’ll update y’all if I find any more issues.
I 100% think that characters should always be fixed timestep, or otherwise let us choose this behavior ourselves. Characters are very fiddly business, and last I checked, adaptive timestepping is still unstable with my custom characters, especially the ones that fly/swim.
Very nice, though @Onett (first part in your video) did a smart move and not physically animating bees anymore lol.
Just saying that animate your pet or morph system on client for better performance.
You should describe the bugs obbies have with Adaptive so that they can be fixed and the performance of obbies can be improved.
Also, Fixed is still available in case games are just broken with Adaptive, but in general I think people should always try to use the newer features like Adaptive and not use old systems like Body Movers.
There seems to be clipping issues when using Adaptive Timestepping on unanchored objects, specifically smaller ones. It doesn’t matter what the Collision fidelity is set to, they all seem to act strange and over time can even just fall through whatever they’re set on top of. Here’s a video showing it in action, the range of sizes on the y-axis for these mesh parts are between 0.2 - 0.09 studs: