[Client Beta] Aerodynamic forces now publishable on live experiences!

[m0bsterlobster (mobsterlobster)]

Hello Creators!

We’re excited to announce that Aerodynamics has now transitioned from Studio Beta to Client Beta!

This means you can now publish experiences with Aerodynamics enabled, allowing all clients and Roblox servers to experience aerodynamics in live experiences. With just a click, aerodynamics allows you to easily create more immersive experiences from realistic weather to lifelike flight simulations.

Thank you so much for all the feedback you provided us during the initial Studio Beta as well as the subsequent updates (November 2023 update & April 2024 update)!

Aero Dynamics

But that’s not all! We’ve added some new functionality to enhance your creations even further:

New Atmosphere Sensor

We’re introducing the Atmosphere Sensor, which returns two new properties:

• AirDensity: Measures the density of the air where the sensor is positioned.
• RelativeWindVelocity: Reports the wind velocity relative to the sensor.

This sensor opens up exciting possibilities for dynamic interactions within your experiences, and we’ve got even more cool features coming your way that will build on this—stay tuned!

Why Client Beta?

Although aerodynamics is now available for live experiences, this is still a Client Beta because we may make minor adjustments to the force models based on your feedback. Once we move past Client Beta, we’ll lock in the force models and promise any future changes will be communicated well in advance and phased in respectfully to avoid disruption.

We will also continue to improve performance based on the experiences you build so we can further optimize for the specific use-cases creators utilize Aerodynamics for.

Recap of Aerodynamics Features

For those new to Aerodynamics, here’s a quick summary of what you can do with this system. Feel free to check the linked posts for more details!

What’s in Aerodynamics?

Aerodynamic Forces:

• Simulates lift, drag, torque, and other forces on objects based on their shape and movement through the air. This includes simulating the effects of any global wind and simulating the effects of air buoyancy!
• Supports wings, control surfaces, and other aerodynamic elements.
• Ideal for creating planes, gliders, and other airborne systems.
• Checkout how to set up aerodynamics in your experience here!

Atmospheric Conditions:

• Air density and wind forces vary by altitude and can be customized for your game.
• Learn more about how you can manipulate air density and what the wind profile looks like here!

Tooling:

• Wind Sock Widget: Studio ribbon tool that allows you to visualize how the wind is currently blowing using a wind sock and gives you a direct way of modifying the speed and direction of the wind (yaw and pitch). Learn more here!
• Studio Visualization Tools: Tools to help visualize aerodynamic forces, torques, and Center of Pressures during testing. Learn more here!

Useful Resources

1. Best Practices for Aerodynamics
2. Lower Minimum Density Info (required to support air buoyancy)
3. FluidFidelity Info
   a. FluidFidelity Overview
   b. FluidFidelity <> Geometry APIs
4. Examples of how to use Aerodynamics

What’s Next?

We hope to continue adding capabilities to the Aerodynamic system over time. These include simpler items like adding relative wind audio and adding a fluid force sensor as well as more complex items like wind occlusion and local winds. Your feedback on these and other potential capabilities would be very valuable.

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We can’t wait to see what you build using the full power of Aerodynamics! As always, we welcome your feedback—your input has been crucial in getting us this far.

Happy flying!
The Physics Team

[drewbluewasabi (Drew)]

This is very cool and I’m excited to see local winds!
I’m still just a bit salty that stepping physics is locked behind Plugin Security

[0Tenth (QuackBack)]

Could the source for the wind sock be released? I think it would be helpful for things like cloth objects.

[C_Corpze (Corpze_TheDeadestOne)]

Oh this is actually super neat!
Air simulation in Roblox?

Does make me wonder if this will be developer further.

Being able to simulate air moving around or through cloth would also be neat, air pressure could also be super cool for simulating objects like balls that can compress/decompress and bounce onto different surfaces.

Though, that might just be a bit too much.

I’m mostly curious, how’s the performance of this?
Is simulating 1000 falling parts slower now or are the aerodynamics very cheap to compute?

[catmaxcatnoob]

ITS FINALLY AVAILABLE IN THE CLIENT LETS GO

[Bergermate]

Wow, super exciting! Can’t wait to start working seriously with this in Studio and see what others create with it. Huge props to the physics team for keeping it so optimized - choosing to have aerodynamics auto-enabled globally tells me they’re confident in their work. Can’t blame them, I’ve been very impressed in my testing by how well it runs!

[GloryToTheSunGod (RadPugGuy)]

very excited to hear there are plans for local forces. I was complaining the other day that i couldnt make a feature request for force fields. Im curious to know whether the plan is for linear force fields only or if we could get things like vortices and drag fields!

Additionally, if you’re willing to add in relative wind audio as a built in feature, I have to wonder whether there are any plans or thoughts on adding other built in audio to the physics system. I.E. calculated audio for collisions determined by the materials of the interacting objects and the speed. It’s a fairly clunky feature to build in studio, and does to me seem like it could benefit heavily from being implemented into the base engine. just a thought. Great update!

[Sir_Pixelated]

I haven’t tested out the aerodynamics yet but does this fix the issue where parts move way faster and further in the air than on land?

[XenoDenissboss1]

Cool. Fun stuff all around but i still can’t see myself really using physics past insanely limited and super simple scenarios. As fancy as these new physics systems are, ultimately they do nothing to address the finicky replication and overall low performance of physics.

A while back i had tried getting aerodynamic stuff to work, specifically just a bunch of props like feathers and such, and a jet engine (toolbox model). It’s cool and all but ultimately the performance cost is way too much. That jet engine could even tank performance to like below 10 FPS within studio for whatever reason. Was it possible that performance was low due to me not really understanding how to actually properly implement aerodynamic things (or overall how to use aerodynamics)? Sure, but the 10 FPS generated by a jet engine with around 10-25~ meshes welded together still didn’t exactly make me really start actually pushing physics to their limits, or even push me into actually using physics past just moving characters.

Is there any chance of getting some sort of substantial physics improvements? Something to address specifically replication and performance.

[BasedMannn]

Once again another amazing update from roblox here

@m0bsterlobster

Studio Visualization Tools: Tools to help visualize aerodynamic forces, torques, and Center of Pressures during testing. Learn more here!

Regarding that statement, will there be a Visualization tool for something like air density? Kinda like with AudioFilter, That has a draggable interface with a response curve. Except this visualizer can edit things like wind forces minus altitude.

[Bergermate]

The performance is great! On my end at least, I haven’t been seeing any performance troubles. I was surprised hearing that the devs plan to enable aerodynamic forces across whole projects, even saying there’d be minimal additional overhead physics-wise.

So, not only do we get real-time aero simulations, but we get them so cheaply that they could be incorporated into central game features… In their words, as central as gravity or collisions, so it’s a pretty big deal!

@FGmm_r2

Our vision is for fluid forces (like Aerodynamics) to be as fundamental as gravity or collision forces on the platform. With that vision in mind, the team has spent a great deal of effort optimizing various aspects of the engine so Aerodynamic forces can be ON for everything in your experience.

[baackup_1st (Backup)]

Reply 1:

@GloryToTheSunGod

if you’re willing to add in relative wind audio as a built in feature

I think you misunderstood pretty sure this is for the Doppler effect not a built in sound effect for wind blowing. an improved doppler effect would certainly be nice so it takes relative velocities between the sound emitter and listener.

(wind speed shouldn’t matter as if I am standing still next to a sound emitter that is also still it wont matter where I am relative to it if the wind is slower than the speed of sound I will hear the sound coming from the sound emitter without any pitch shifting only a delay but I don’t think Roblox models any delay with its sounds might be wrong though)

Reply 2:

@m0bsterlobster

local winds

what about local pressures?

[sc_tt]

It would be very interesting to see how this is used in Disaster Survival themed games.

Will this create lag in games with so many moving properties and/or parts as seen in the demo?

[abidbmt]

With the relative wind audio, are you also planning on simulating speed of sound? Speed of sound simulation would be an awesome addition!

[Damp]

Wow, this is super neat! Updates like this keep me excited for the future of ROBLOX and what creative minds will put together.

Now we need a Natural Disaster 2.0!

[700000002 (Tenny)]

Very nice; I may start using the engine aerodynamics instead of simulating it through code. I agree with @0Tenth, resources based on the models we saw in the video would be nice for opening up and reverse engineering

[c0mmandhat (Commandhat)]

So this is why I had to spend a half-hour pulling a 330mb client update through a 7mb down pipe yesterday. Very good news!

I have a couple of questions:

1. Now that this is a client beta, are you looking to highlight experiences demonstrating the new wind model? Better physics almost universally equals better showcases. I imagine people like Asimo are chomping at the bit to demonstrate the new features.
2. Is it possible for us to locally distort AirDensity? Say, artifically inflating said density to an insane degree inside a closed environment, then deleting an invisible wall. Air pressure in normal physics would force the contents of the room down the tube, a bit like those pipes in Portal 2.
3. Are you accepting bug reports for model innaccuracies at this time? This is not to say I’ve found any since I have yet to dedicate time to play with experience ideas that require the wind model, but I am excited to do so soon.

[matsagor1]

This changes the games for the better. Games like airplane simulators and others will now become many times more realistic!

[sinanxd2 (Fisher)]

Nice, but shouldn’t this property be toggled off by default? Most of the existing parts enabled EnableFluidForces property aswell.