Who Could Buy Unity? / News / June 7, 2025 / Business, Unity Earlier this week 80.lv ran the incredibly misleadingarticle Analyst Suggests Apple Might be Considering Buying Unity After Legal Defeat to Epic Games. Might is doing some heavy lifting there as there is no actual evidence that Apple or any other company are currently looking to purchase Unity Technologies. That said, it is an interesting topic as a pure thought exercise. So today we are going to discuss the companies that could be potential suitors for Unity. Unity The obvious place to start is with Unity Technologies, which is to say they can simply stay an independent organization. While they are not profitable, their financial situation has been trending in a positive direction of late and they have sufficient cash and resources to stay independent for the foreseeable future. Should things get bad at Unity, it is possible one of their largest investorscould take the company private again. Put simply, Unity does not need to be purchased and things can be kept as they are. Apple The original premise of this article is that Apple should buy Unity. Reasons why Apple should buy Unity: Apple and Unity have a long history, with Unity having been originally a Mac exclusive application and it has always supported Apple platforms Unity is by far the most used application for creating games on the Apple App Store Unity Grow productscould have good synergy with Apples products Apple could prevent a potential future rival, especially around 3rd party app stores Reasons why Apple won’t buy Unity: Apple has never made a purchase anywhere near the size of Unity. Their largest acquisition to datewould be 1/4 to 1/5 the size of acquiring Unity Apple has never really gotten involved in gaming beyond small initiatives in the past Apple mostly grows in-house over acquisition and more acquisitions are subsumed into other Apple products, Unity is not a good fit here Amazon Amazon have heaps of cash and aren’t afraid to use it such as acquiring MGM, Whole Foods, Twitch and many more companies over the years. They also have several gaming-oriented interests and have made an attemptto become a major game developer in the past. Reasons why Amazon should buy Unity: Amazon tried to enter gaming in a big way once already with the licensing of CryEngine to create Lumberyardand buying up or forming several game studios. Unity would provide a much larger and more established foothold should they wish to buy their way in Amazon web services could be a good compliment to Unity’s server side offerings, while Unity’s Grow division could be a good fit for Amazon platforms Integration with their gaming platformsReasons why Amazon won’t buy Unity: Their last attempt into game development was a massive failure and much of it was rumored to be a culture problem Tencent Tencent have invested HEAVILY into the world of gamingand aren’t afraid of throwing money around, so Unity could be a good fit in that portfolio. That said recent political climate changes would render this acquisition very unlikely. Reasons why Tencent should buy Unity: Tencent have a presence across the entire gaming industry and already have a minority stake in Epic Games. This would more or less give them a controlling influence over two of the biggest players in the space Access to or ownership of Unity’s recently created China Joint Venture Integration with Tencents other holdings like WeChat or Snap might provide some synergies Reasons why Tencent won’t buy Unity: Not a snowballs chance in hell that regulators allow this acquisition to happen, from antitrust issues of owning stakes in both Unity and Unreal Engine, to just more broad geopolitical issues in the modern world Microsoft Microsoft are heavily invested in two areas that overlap with Unity, gaming and software development tools. On paper they might appear to be the perfect suitor for Unity and they have the cash hoard to make such a purchase with ease. Reasons why Microsoft should buy Unity: Unlike Apple, Microsoft has long been a proponent of growth via acquisition with some of their pillar products coming in the form of acquisitions. They also do not shy away from huge dollar purchases such as Activision Blizzard, LinkedIn, Nuance, Skype, ZeniMax, GitHub, Nokia, MojangMicrosoft have a long history of leveraging their development tools to grow their platforms Microsoft gaming studios/relationships/holdings such as XBox, Game Pass/PC Gaming, DirectX, Havok, etc. could benefit from a tighter relationship with Unity Like Amazon, Microsoft server-side servicescould be used to power Unity Grow services Reasons why Microsoft won’t buy Unity: Microsoft only just finished their acquisition of Activision and it was an arduous and nearly doomed process. Buying another company in the gaming space might be a step too far for regulators While Microsoft doesn’t mind spending huge money on acquisitions, they also don’t mind killing those companies off after, especially if there is a market downturn like we are experiencing now AppLovin If there is a company that is most likely to buy Unity, and that would synergize best with Unity products, it’s AppLovin. In broad strokes, AppLovin, IronSource and Unityare all in the same business. On top of that many of AppLovin’s biggest customers and products are directly tied to the Unity ecosystem. In fact, Unity and AppLovin are such a good fit that AppLovin attempted to buy Unity for nearly B back in 2022, when Unity instead pursued it’s doomed merger with IronSource. So, why would it make sense for AppLovin to buy Unity now? Well, these two 5 year stock performance charts more or less tell the entire story: It becomes crystal clear from that fateful date in August of 2022 which company has performed better and right now AppLovin is absolutely flush with cash. If there is a company that makes sense to acquire Unity, it’s AppLovin. Of course now that Unity owns IronSource, there are certainly questions of regulatory approval if this would even be allowed. Once again, this entire exercise is simply a thought exercise, just for fun. There is no public available news that ANYONE are looking to acquire Unity, nor that Unity is looking to be acquired. You can learn more about my thoughts on the matter in the video below. #who #could #buy #unity

Nvidia's RTX Remix is a remarkable tool that allows game modders to bring state-of-the-art path traced visuals to classic PC games. We've seen Portal RTX from Nvidia already, along with the development of a full-on remaster of Half-Life 2 - but I was excited to see a community of modders take on 2004's Painkiller, enhanced now to become Painkiller RTX. It's still a work-in-progress project as of version 0.1.6, but what I've seen so far is still highly impressive - and if you have the means, I recommend checking it out. The whole reason RTX Remix works with the original Painkiller is due to its custom rendering technology, known as the PainEngine. This 2004 release from People Can Fly Studios was built around Direct X 8.1, which gave it stellar visuals at the time, including bloom effects – specular lighting with limited bump mapping and full framebuffer distortion effects. Those visuals dazzled top-end GPU owners of the time, but like a great number of PC releases from that era, it had a DX7 fallback which culled the fancier shading effects and could even run on GPUs like the original GeForce. RTX Remix uses the fixed function DX7 path and replaces the core rendering with the path tracer - and that is how I have been playing the game these last few days, taking in the sights and sounds of Painkiller with a new lick of paint. It's an upgrade that has made me appreciate it all the more now in 2025 as it is quite a special game that history has mostly forgotten. To fully enjoy the modders' work on the path-traced upgrade to Painkiller, we highly recommend this video.Watch on YouTube Painkiller is primarily a singleplayer first-person shooter that bucked the trends of the time period. After Half-Life and Halo: Combat Evolved, many first person shooters trended towards a more grounded and storytelling-based design. The classic FPS franchises like Quake or Unreal had gone on to become wholly focused on multiplayer, or else transitioned to the storytelling route - like Doom 3, for example. Painkiller took all of those 'modern' trappings and threw them in the garbage. A narrative only exists in a loose sense with pre-rendered video that bookends the game’s chapters, acting only as a flimsy excuse to send the player to visually distinct levels that have no thematic linking beyond pointing you towards enemies that you should dispatch with a variety of weapons. The basic gameplay sounds familiar if you ever played Doom Eternal or Doom 2016. It is simple on paper, but thanks to the enemy and level variety and the brilliant weaponry, it does not get tiring. The game enhanced its traditional FPS gameplay with an extensive use of Havok physics – where a great deal of the game’s environmental objects could be broken up into tiny pieces with rigid body movement on all the little fragments, or environmental objects could be manipulated with ragdoll or rope physics. Sometimes it is there for purely visual entertainment but other times it has a gameplay purpose with destructible objects often containing valuable resources or being useful as a physics weapon against the game's enemies. So, what's the score with Painkiller RTX? Well, the original's baked lighting featured hardly any moving lights and no real-time perspective-correct shadows - so all of that is added as part and parcel of the path-traced visuals. The RTX renderer also takes advantage of ray-traced fog volumes, showing shadows in the fog in the areas where light is obscured. Another aspect you might notice is that the game’s various pickups have been now made to be light-emissive. In the original game, emissives textures are used to keep things full bright even in darkness, but they themselves emit no light. Since the path tracer fully supports emissive lighting from any arbitrary surface, they all now cast light, making them stand out even more in the environment. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. The original game extensively used physics objects, which tended to lead to a clash in lighting and shading for any moving objects, which were incongruous then with the static baked lighting. Turn on the path tracer and these moving objects are grounded into the environment with shadows of their own, while receiving and casting light themselves. Boss battles are transformed as those enemies are also fully grounded in the surrounding environments, perfectly integrated into the path-traced visuals - and even if the titanic enemies are off-screen, their shadows are not. The main difference in many scenes is just down to the new lighting - it's more physicalised now as dynamic objects are properly integrated, no longer floating or glowing strangely. One reason for this is due to lighting resolution. The original lighting was limited by trying to fit in 256MB of VRAM, competing for space with the game’s high resolution textures. Painkiller RTX's lighting and shadowing is achieved at a per-pixel level in the path tracer, which by necessity means that you tend to see more nuance, along with more bounce lighting as it is no longer erased away by bilinear filtering on chunky light map textures. Alongside more dynamism and detail, there are a few new effects too. Lit fog is heavily used now in many levels - perhaps at its best in the asylum level where the moonlight and rain are now illuminated, giving the level more ambience than it had before. There is also some occasional usage of glass lighting effects like the stain glass windows in the game now filtering light through them properly, colouring the light on the ground in the pattern of the individual mosaic patterns found on their surface. Half-Life 2 RTX - built on RTX Remix - recently received a demo release. It's the flagship project for the technology, but modders have delivered path traced versions of many modern games.Watch on YouTube New textures and materials interact with the path tracer in ways that transform the game. For some objects, I believe the modders used Quixel megascan assets to give the materials parallax along with a high resolution that is artistically similar to the original game. A stoney ground in the graveyard now actually looks stoney, thanks to a different texture: a rocky material with craggy bits and crevices that obscure light and cast micro shadows, for example. Ceramic tiles on the floor now show varying levels of depth and cracks that pick up a very dull level of reflectivity from the moon-lit sky. Some textures are also updated by running them through generative tools which interpret dark areas of the baked textures as recesses and lighter areas as raised edges and assigns them a heightmap. This automated process works quite well for textures whose baked features are easily interpreted, but for textures that had a lot of noise added into them to simulate detail, the automated process can be less successful. That is the main issue I would say with the RTX version so far: some of these automated textures have a few too many bumps in them, making them appear unnatural. But that is just the heightmap data as the added in material values to give the textures sheen tend to look universally impressive. The original game barely has any reflectivity, and now a number of select surfaces show reflections in full effect, like the marble floors at the end of the game's second level. For the most part though, the remix of textures from this mod is subtle, with many textures still being as diffuse as found in the original game: rocky and dirty areas in particular look much the same as before, just with more accurately rendered shadows and bounce lighting - but without the plasticy sheen you might typically find in a seventh generation game. Whether maxed on an RTX 5090 or running on optimised settings on an RTX 4060, the current work-in-progress version of Painkiller RTX can certainly challenge hardware. | Image credit: Digital Foundry Make no mistake though: path tracing doesn't come cheap and to play this game at decent frame-rates, you either need to invest in high performance hardware or else accept some compromises to settings. Being a user mod that's still in development, I imagine this could improve in later versions but at the moment, Painkiller RTX maxed out is very heavy - even heavier than Portal RTX. So if you want to play it on a lower-end GPU, I recommend my optimised settings for Portal RTX, which basically amounts to turning down the amount of possible light bounces to save on performance and skimping a bit in other areas. Even with that, an RTX 4060 was really struggling to run the game well. With frame generation on and DLSS set to 1080p balanced with the transformer model, 80fps to 90fps was the best I could achieve in the general combat zones, with the heaviest stages dipping into the 70s - and even into the 60s with frame generation. The mod is still work-in-progress, but even now, Painkiller RTX is still a lot of fun and it can look stunning if your hardware is up to it. But even if you can't run it, I do hope this piece and its accompanying video pique your interest in checking out Painkiller in some form. Even without the path-traced upgrade, this is a classic first-person shooter that's often overlooked and more than holds its own against some of the period's better known games. #painkiller #rtx #pathtraced #upgrade #classic

Starting October 13, we’re changing our pricing for Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, and Unity Industrial Collection, our first price increase in almost three years. This announcement will not affect Unity Personal or Unity Plus pricing.Our per-seat subscription pricing will be adjusted as follows:Unity Pro annual prepaid pricing will be /yr, and annual monthly paid plans will be /mo.Unity Enterprise annual prepaid pricing will be /yr.Unity Industrial Collection annual prepaid pricing will be /yr.Note: Unity Personal and Unity Plus pricing are not affected by this announcement.The new pricing goes into effect on October 13, 2022 for Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, and UIC. Online customers can visit their account before this date to renew or switch to an annual plan for greater savings. Customers with account managers should reach out to them directly to discuss the options based on their custom agreements. Find more details in the FAQs below.If you have further questions, contact Unity support or talk to your account manager.Who is affected by the new pricing?The new pricing applies to both new and existing Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, and Unity Industrial Collectioncustomers on monthly or annual plans. Unity Personal and Unity Plus customers are not affected.When does the new pricing take effect?For new Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, and UIC customers, the new pricing is effective on October 13, 2022, 13:00 UTC.For existing Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, and UIC customers, the new pricing goes into effect on October 13, 2022. Online customers can visit their account before this date to renew or switch to an annual plan for greater savings. Customers with account managers should reach out to them directly to discuss the options based on their custom agreements.Which plans are included in the price change?Prices are changing for Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, UIC, and bundles containing these plans, as well as Starter Success, Build License, Pro Build Server, and Enterprise Build Server.Unity Personal and Unity Plus plans are not included in the price change.Each seat of Unity Pro will be /year, Unity Enterprise will be /year, and UIC will be /year for annual prepaid plans. We offer other options such as monthly payment for certain plans.Per seat pricingUnity Plan Current List Price New Price on October 13, 2022 Unity Pro, prepaid yearly /year /year Unity Pro, paid monthly /month /month Unity Enterprise /year /year Unity Industrial Collection /year /yearFor more details, please see the extended FAQ.What other changes are being made to the plans?The changes below will take effect starting on October 13, 2022. For more details, please see the extended FAQ.Unity Pro – New and existing plans will include Unity Mars, as well as Havok Physics for Unity with the release of Unity 2022.2 this fall.Unity Enterprise – New and existing plans will receive an additional year of Long Term Supportstarting with 2021 LTS.New and existing customers or those upgrading from Unity Pro to Unity Enterprise will receive access to read-only source code on request.Enterprise plans will also include new support offerings:1–19 seat accounts receive Starter Success, a technical support package to help you overcome issues with assistance from Unity engineers.20+ seat accounts get a Partner Relations Manager, an internal advocate and strategic advisor to accelerate projects.100+ seat customers will receive Bug Handling and LTS backporting at no additional charge.This plan will also include Unity Mars, as well as Havok Physics for Unity with the release of Unity 2022.2 this fall.Unity Industrial Collection – Starter Success is an entry-level technical support package that helps you overcome issues with assistance from Unity engineers. New customers or those upgrading from Unity Pro to UIC will receive access to Starter Success. Existing UIC customers who have a contract expiry date after October 13, 2022 will receive Starter Success upon renewal.This plan will also include Unity Mars, as well as Havok Physics for Unity with the release of Unity 2022.2 this fall.We are updating our Terms of Service for all Unity subscription plans, effective October 13, 2022, to create a more streamlined, user-friendly set of terms. Please review them here.Why is the price of my Unity plan changing?The new price reflects the value of our products today, and it’s our first increase in almost three years.In that time, we’ve expanded our R&D resources by 172%, with the Unity Editor being our largest focus for R&D investment at Unity. This continued investment has helped us deliver Unity 2021 LTS with powerful improvements to workflows, rendering capabilities, and supported platforms.We will continue delivering improvements based on your feedback in every release to enhance your productivity, performance and stability.What is happening to the free Unity Personal plan?Unity Personal will remain free to creators with revenue or fundingbelow USD K in the past year. We are committed to ensuring Unity continues to be accessible to the millions of students, hobbyists, and indies starting out on their game development journeys.I still have more questions!Don’t see your question here? Get more details on Unity Pro, Unity Enterprise, Unity Industrial Collection, Unity Mars, Havok Physics for Unity, and how this change will impact your specific payment plan in our extended FAQ. #unity #pro #enterprise #plans #new

Announced back at the Game Developers Conference2019, Havok Physics for Unity was initially distributed as an experimental package on the Unity Asset Store. Now, with the availability of ECS for Unityin the Unity 2022.2 Tech Stream, Havok Physics for Unity is officially supported for production. In fact, we’ve made this package available to all Unity Pro, Enterprise, and Industrial Collection subscribers for free.Havok Physics for Unity is built on the same foundation of technology that powers many of the world’s leading game franchises like Destiny and Assassin’s Creed, among others. When we first set out to define what the future of physics could look like with our Data-Oriented Technology Stack, we sought a partner that shared the same core concepts and values as us. Through our partnership with Havok, we were able to leverage DOTS to deliver the highly optimized, stateless, entirely C#, and performant Unity Physics we know today.We also prepared for more complex simulation requirements for users who might need a stateful physics system. We knew that Havok would be the perfect solution to integrate into Unity for those high-end simulation needs.The Havok Physics for Unity package is written using the same C# ECS framework as Unity Physics, and is backed by the closed-source, proprietary Havok Physics engine, written in native C++. Havok Physics for Unity is heavily optimized for many typical gaming use cases. For example, core algorithms have been refined over many years with various automatic caching strategies, meaning that CPU resources are spent only as needed.Since the experimental package, Unity and Havok have been working together with early users of the plug-in to drive improvements and add new features.Here’s a breakdown of what’s new:Havok Physics for Unity is now available for free for all Unity Pro, Enterprise, and Unity Industrial Collection subscribers.Havok Physics for Unity is based on the 2021.2 version of the original Havok SDK, and brings more stability and performance to the Unity plug-in.As part of the full release, we’ve incorporated support for motorized joints, such as linear position, as well as linear, rotational, and angular velocity.We’ve also added new methods to the HavokSimulation API, which enables granular stepping for your simulations, plus methods for accessing Havok simulations more efficiently with singletons.Check out the complete changelog of updates to Havok Physics for Unity.Havok Physics is a robust physics engine designed to handle the performance demands of the most dynamic games, often involving complex scenes with lots of physical interaction. By working with partners across the industry for over 20 years, Havok has encountered, solved, and continued to iterate on some of the toughest problems facing real-time physics simulation. This investment has led to the stable stacking of physics bodies, minimal artifacts for fast-moving bodies, and generally more controlled behavior, especially when it comes to non-optimized collision geometry.Of course, physics means action, so let’s see how these two creators are currently taking action with Havok Physics for Unity.Title:Hostile Mars Studio:Big Rook Games Studio size:Individual Platforms: Windows PC, console Genre: Open-world, base-building automation tower defense Players: Single playerFirst presented at PAX – East in 2022, Hostile Mars drew in quite an audience with its dedicated use of physics and unique blend of genres. The vast Martian landscape is brought to life in an open-world factory base-building and automation game. Players confront each other at the ground level in close combat to defend their factories through both third-person shooting and programmable defenses.Jake Jameson, founder of Big Rook Games, began by blending genres across multiplayer and single-player games – adding elements from puzzlers along with first-person shootersand wave-based shooters. The more he evolved this idea, the more he narrowed his focus on creating a single-player base builder. He soon discovered the ideal balance between building, strategy, and combat, finally leading up to the one and only Hostile Mars.When completing that final iteration of Hostile Mars, it was clear the game needed to use some sort of data-oriented programming model. Jake wanted to have large enemy waves while still achieving high-end visuals. In order to provide the players with the best possible experience, the game had to run performantly on a massive scale, supporting thousands of enemies simultaneously onscreen.To meet these demands, Jake turned to Unity’s Data-Oriented Technology Stack. In leveraging ECS for Unity, every enemy in Hostile Mars could run real-time Mesh Physics/Collisions, A* Pathfinding, and Local Avoidance, in addition to robust state systems, animations, weapon and projectile systems, high-quality VFX, particle systems, and more.“Without DOTS, I wouldn’t have been able to provide the experience that I imagined in my original design. It just wouldn’t have been possible without implementing my own ECS framework, and as a solo dev, this isn’t viable given my timeline and budget.” – Jake Jameson, founder of Big Rook GamesAlthough Jake is not a game developer by trade, he is an avid gamer and was already familiar with the original Havok Physics engine. Knowing how trusted Havok’s technology has been among AAA studios, Jake felt confident implementing it as soon as it became available in Unity via the experimental package.Hostile Mars is a physics-intensive experience. The player uses physics-based traps and turrets to manipulate the physics properties of enemies. By applying different physical properties to enemies, the goal is to stop them in their tracks or drive them toward more dangerous traps.Not to mention that Hostile Mars involves an incredible number of enemies. More specifically, there are up to 5,000 individual physics-based enemies that can flood the player’s Martian factories, which leads to hundreds of collisions and projectiles onscreen at once.All of the physics in Hostile Mars utilizes Havok Physics for Unity; from the collisions between projectiles and enemies, players and enemies, even enemies and other enemies, to enemies and the landscape itself, and hovering enemies who require a constant state of force to stay afloat. These distinct physics interactions take place in real-time, with physical simulation that allows for believable hovering, gravity, and mesh point collisions. So when players strike their enemies at a particular point, they will see them spin away just as Havok Physics for Unity intended them to.Not only are the enemies entirely physics-based, but the traps that are necessary for gameplay are physics-based too. There are gravity traps that push and pull enemies, which in turn, slow down or speed up traps that smash enemies. There are even traps that spring spikes up into an enemy’s path, not just pushing them aside, but realistically simulating the force and velocity of the spikes so that the enemy reaction appears authentic.Once the players advance, the enemy waves become varied and increasingly complex, which requires players to build traps more strategically, combining their different physics-based interactions to herd enemies with different weaknesses toward stronger traps and turrets that can impact them most. For example, while a frost trap might slow some enemies down, an explosive trap can deal the most damage possible against a highly concentrated wave.Plans for releasing Hostile Mars on consoles are still in the works, but in the meantime, you can add Hostile Mars for Windows PC to your Wishlist on Steam today.Title: Robocraft 2 Studio:Freejam Games Studio size:25 Platforms:Windows PC, console Genre: Online vehicular combat Players: 5v5 online multiplayerRobocraft 2 is the free-to-play sequel to 2017’s award-winning Robocraft, where players build customizable robot battle vehicles that drive, hover, walk, and fly in an open-world multiplayer environment. Since this initial success, the team at Freejam Games has refined a fully customizable experience for Robocraft 2, so that players can bring their own creations to competitive multiplayer gameplay.As Freejam Games experimented with projects following the success of Robocraft, they focused on providing exciting new building tools. This way, players could enjoy more freedom to design complex, physics-simulated creations.The team evaluated how moving the physics from the client side to dedicated multiplayer game servers could enhance the physical interactions between the vehicles and robots created by the players. They discovered that relegating the physics to the server created a range of fun gameplay moments, wherein weight, inertia, momentum, friction, mass, and bounciness were all accurately simulated. In other words, the heavy vehicles could easily push lighter ones, or be combined with joints like pistons, servos, and rotating platforms. Even weapons and explosions applied realistic kickback and force when they hit. All of these experiments, alongside community testing and feedback, culminated in Robocraft 2.In Robocraft 2, players now get to create complex vehicles, take them into battle, and destroy them in 5v5 team battles online. From their experience with the first Robocraft game, the Freejam team knew how competitive and creative their players could be, finding new ways to optimize the provided building tools in order to win battles.This meant that the team had to rely on three key features from their physics engine in order to provide a fair experience for all:Fast performanceRobust, non-glitchy physics simulationAccess to low-level areas of the physics engine to make modifications in the gamePrior to the 2017 announcement of DOTS and ECS for Unity, Freejam Games explored the possibility of building their ECS framework in-house. They then quickly adopted ECS for Unity in its experimental release, starting with Unity Physics. For experiments with server-side tech, they used determinism as a solution for keeping the player clients and simulation on the server in sync, while Unity Physicsprovided the performance.As the game evolved, they moved away from a stateless approach and became early adopters of Havok Physics for Unity. As a stateful system, Havok Physics for Unity ultimately powered the performance of the simulation within the gameplay requirements for Robocraft 2.“The high performance of Havokallows us to have accurate server-side physics in our online game. In turn, that provides several significant benefits including giving all clients an equal representation of the physics for a better quality experience. The fact that the server is authoritative over the simulation also has the added benefit of reducing the opportunity for cheaters.” – Ed Fowler, principal programmer and cofounder of FreejamHavok Physics for Unity helped Freejam Games solve complicated issues. For example, as players defeat opponents, the robots and vehicles fall apart block by block, which can create hundreds of Rigidbodies in the environment. To free up CPU and maintain high frame rates, those inactive Rigidbodies can be put to sleep via Deactivation, a feature that effectively removes the physics from broken pieces temporarily.Player creations in Robocraft 2 consist of many Rigidbodies with Compound Colliders constrained together by joints, which can be smashed or stacked on top of one another. Further improvements to overall performance of the physics simulation can be gained with Collision Caching, which additionally allows for refined simulation of joints/constraints, such as in those stacking situations.Lastly, the Havok Visual Debugger was used to visualize the collision in the game world in real-time. It enabled Freejam Games to identify glitches, snags, and efficiently spot instances where rogue contacts arise. This accelerated their workflow and prompted fast fixes.Want to see Robocraft 2 in action? Add it to your Wishlist on Steam.To help you get started, check out the ECS Physics Samples on GitHub.If you need more guidance, we created a tutorial to help you learn more about Unity’s physics options, including Havok Physics for Unity.By the end of the tutorial, you will be able to do the following:Describe the key benefits of Havok Physics for Unity and Unity PhysicsExplain the relationship between Unity Physics and Havok Physics for UnityIdentify situations where physics solutions for ECS are the right fit for a projectThis tutorial is an introduction to physics solutions in ECS for Unity, tailored to users with an intermediate or advanced level of experience with the Unity Editor. As mentioned earlier, DOTS is Unity’s Data-Oriented Technology Stack, a suite of data-oriented technologies for users looking to make complex projects with highly optimized performance. If you want to learn more about DOTS, we recommend the newly-released DOTS Guide on GitHub.We are also actively engaging with many of you on the DOTS channel, part of the Unity Discord, and in the forums. We look forward to learning more about the projects you’re building with Havok Physics for Unity. #havok #physics #unity #now #supported

With each passing generation, technology enjoyers around the world breathlessly await the arrival of a new id Software game. While the id of today is far removed from its origins, the mission remains the same - to produce beautiful, state of the art visuals at blistering frame-rates. The studio's latest work is no exception. Doom: The Dark Ages marks the arrival of id Tech 8 and with it, a massive slate of impressive tech arrives. From its reliance on ray tracing to its robust physics simulation and brand new materials system, all the through to massive scale battles boasting sublime physics and animation, this is a phenomenal technical showcase and a fantastic game. One of the things I really appreciate about modern id Software games is the studio's willingness to experiment and pivot. While the fundamentals of Doom: The Dark Ages are largely similar - shoot, pummel and otherwise vanquish demon hoards - the way in which this is achieved varies dramatically. Doom Eternal is a very different game compared to the 2016 reboot and this is also true of Doom: The Dark Ages, which shifts to much larger, open areas with higher enemy counts and very different mechanics. It is this desire to change the formula that helps drive the underlying technology. Fundamentally, id Tech 8 was designed to enable this particular game very specifically - which means it needed to support larger maps, more on-screen enemies and major changes to the way everything is lit. When it comes to major changes from id Tech 7, the most impactful arguably stems from its shift to fully ray traced lighting, but beyond the obvious, ray tracing is used for other techniques and to improve the development experience. Similar to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the headline feature is ray traced global illumination. This allows for light sources to directly and indirectly light the surrounding space, creating beautiful, realistic and natural results. Unlike Eternal, The Dark Ages features a lot of soft lighting from the often dark skies above rather than high intensity electric lights everywhere. With the generous assistance of id Software, Digital Foundry is able to take you behind the scenes of the id Tech 8 engine technology.Watch on YouTube Doom: The Dark Ages uses an irradiance cache in probe volumes. Before ray traced lighting like this, developers would often pre-calculate these results through pre-computing or 'baking'. This technique meant that world lighting was more static and the actual iteration and build times were much slower. This is one of the most important shifts for the team. Speaking with Billy Khan, Director of Engine Technology at id Software, he noted that ray tracing essentially allowed them to shift to a What You See is What You Get model or WISIWYG. This means that when using id Studio, artists can adjust lighting directly in the editor and see the results instantly: something that would previously require baking to even preview, so it saves a lot of time, allowing the team to work at a much larger scale. When played on the PC, players can also take advantage of ray traced specular reflections much like Doom Eternal. The result is good but the game features a much higher concentration of very rough materials so it's less noticeable compared to Doom Eternal's shiny wonderland of pain. In addition, ray tracing is used for impact effects and footsteps. The idea here is that by leveraging RT, it's possible to more realistically blend the material with the decals to create something that feels bespoke for every situation. For hit impacts, RT helps determine the most accurate positioning when rendering these decals on models. Fully ray-marched volumetrics are also part of the mix. From the clouds to the fog and more, the game now leans heavily on ray-marched effects to lend the game a thicker atmosphere. This technique isn't new, but it's still rather uncommon yet produces tremendous results. When it comes to these volumetric effects, artists can essentially paint and manipulate them in real-time. Artists can create fast-moving clouds, variable cloud cover and shapes and generally just generate beautiful and interesting visual results. The large open outdoor areas basically necessitated a move towards a more robust system like this and it does work well. Doom: The Dark Ages uses an irradiance cache in probe volumes (top left) with the balance of the images showing how the RT effects look when enabled and disabled. As with all the shots on this page, click on the images for higher resolution versions. | Image credit: id Software While on the subject of lighting and shadow, Doom: The Dark Ages also makes use of two other depth enhancing features - SSDO for ambient occlusion and parallax occlusion mapping. Both of these increase surface depth and complexity. While the RTGI solution is very effective, it still has precision limitations which necessitate the use of a screen-space solution but SSDO in this case is used both in direct and indirect situations with shadows applied in the correct direction per local light sources making it far more effective overall. Speaking of parallax effects, this brings us to the game's extremely robust and flexible materials system. Firstly, designers can now combine up to eight bespoke physically-based material layers on a single surface. This allows artists to create more complex surfaces while avoiding tiling and keeping the memory footprint in check. One of the key benefits is how damage to these surfaces reveals underlying materials - if you unload on a wall, for instance, the underlying structural material is revealed and chunky, parallax occlusion mapping helps create the impression of actual damage to the surface. This can also be used in situations where shooting the mud blasts away at its surface causing more water to fill in, erxpanding the size of the puddles. Basically, surfaces are inherently reactive to your actions that go beyond a traditional decal system - the combination of more advanced decals and material composition layers adds a lot to the presentation. Physics also receive a significant upgrade - it's a complex collection of systems that work in tandem to massively improve interactivity. My favourite addition is the inclusion of breakable objects - and these are featured all over the game, from railings that smash apart when you walk through them, buildings and structures that realistically collapse in pieces as you engage with them and scenery that reacts to your movements. It's all here and it's very precise. Shoot individual chunks and pieces of an object and it breaks just as you'd expect before collapsing under its own weight. At its core, id worked closely with Havok to deliver the tooling for use in id Studio. The team focused on perfecting a powerful rigid body collision system while minimising object inner-penetration and exhibiting realistic weight and mass. These objects needed to properly behave amidst the chaotic combat loop while remaining performant. It's not just about the rendering. Doom: The Dark Ages' physics enhancements create memorable moments of destruction. | Image credit: Digital Foundry But there's a lot more to Doom: The Dark Ages. Firstly, there's the weather and wind systems which are extremely robust. The wind system controls things like vegetation animation - wind direction and speed are taken into account across foliage. Using fluid simulation, the game also features more complex secondary motions. For instance, if you fire an explosive weapon near a patch of grass, the explosion causes the foliage to react. Cloth simulation is also in the game so flags, the Slayer's cloak and more are all included in the wind simulation. The idea was to create a cohesive wind system that made the world feel alive and consistent across the board. When coupling this with the atmospheric effects, fog volumes and weather, I'd say that id Software achieved its goal. The very first stage takes place during a rainstorm and everything works in tandem to create something that feels unbelievably intense and beautiful. Of course, this needed to extend across the entire environment, so id also introduced a new water surface simulation which allows proper ripples and reactions in bodies of water. I'm a sucker for effects like this - it's nothing new but it's always wonderful to see. The key here is that all these systems allowed the team to create environments that feel dramatically different than what has come before. The prior two games were all about high contrast and bright lights but RT - in combination with the other technologies - allows id to pursue a more subdued, darker tone without the usual visual limitations, and it's all depicted at a much larger scale. In Doom Eternal, Super Gore Nest was the most geometrically dense map from its original campaign but with The Dark Ages, there are maps featuring upwards of ten times more detail. These maps are broken up into multiple sectors and a single sector can offer as much geometric detail as the entirety of Super Gore Nest. Doom: The Dark Ages delivers the same kind of enemy hordes that the 2D-sprite based originals had - but augmented with remarkable physics, dismemberment and animation. | Image credit: Digital Foundry Prior to launch, I pondered if id had shifted towards a virtualised geometry system along the lines of Unreal Engine's Nanite but it turns out that's not actually the case. Rather, the studio has simply expanded the number of LODs, improved blending between them, honed their scene-culling systems and basically focused first on pixel quality above all else. To that end, pop-in can still be observed at times but most of the scenery appears extremely stable while running fast. In addition, grass rendering is also offloaded entirely to the GPU and tessellated according to camera proximity. In practice, I found that pop-in issues were mostly not noticeable outside of specific vegetation issues or the occasional distant texture. Since we're talking about these large, complex maps, another key improvement is the addition of a proper data streaming system. Prior id Tech games needed to store the map in memory upon loading - but now everything is broken up into a multitude of sectors which means less data is needed in RAM when loading into a mission. As a result, the loading times stand as among the fastest I've seen this gen. It's so fast that I almost question the inclusion of loading screens at all. This has gameplay implications too - it means that when you die, the time to continue is ultra short making you want to keep trying which is key for high difficulty settings. Next up, let's talk about the enemies. There are multiple elements in play that make for some beautifully responsive animation, hit reactions and behaviour. That starts with the individual animations: characters move with proper weight, shifting that weight as they change direction - and the way they storm the battlefield in huge numbers feels amazing. In addition, as you kill them, the way they stumble, fall and blow away is very satisfying, highlighting excellent secondary animation. This also highlights the new gore system. As you fire on foes, flesh breaks away in a shower of blood, leaving exposed bone and sinew below the surface. On top of all this, the engine is now capable of supporting many more on-screen enemies at once. This is the first modern Doom game that manages to get close to capturing the original games in terms of sheer enemy numbers. The shift to polygon graphics put massive limitations on this in the past but no longer. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. The new approach to cutscenes is worth showcasing. Yes, id has included more story sequences in Doom. On paper, this sounds like an ill-advised idea but in reality, I really enjoyed them. I'll leave you to judge the narrative itself but the quality of the cutscenes represents a gigantic leap forward from prior id Software titles. Character models, lighting, camera effects, colour grading and more are all set up beautifully. To accomplish this, id developed a more robust cinematics editing tool allowing artists to dial in every pixel with excruciating detail. Due to the real-time nature of RT lighting, the team could essentially light each scene as if it were a movie set. Thankfully, as far as pacing is concerned, these scenes tend to play only at the start and end of a mission and serve as a nice breather. So, I've concentrated on the technology but the fact is that I'm a huge fan of Doom old and new - and I've got lots to say about the new game itself. It's an interesting one as, fundamentally, it is a very different experience compared to the last two entries. The whole stand and fight approach means the flow of combat differs as you're ultimately less mobile - but that doesn't mean you don't have a lot of movement options. While it's a little slow at first, once you have full access to your arsenal, the game really takes off. In fact, there are aspects here that remind me of bullet hell shooters. There are projectiles, of course, but also elements like shield-wielding foes that come in groups - you'll quickly learn that taking them out involves slamming your shield into theirs after unloading a few rounds and then they blow up. It's all about comboing your attacks together to take out larger groups faster. As before, Doom still has you identifying threats and tackling them appropriately, it's just that the way you deal with these threats has changed. Furthermore, the glory kill system is radically changed - most attacks do not actually take control from you as they did before. Our exploration of the id Tech 8 engine used the PC version to show the features at their highest - current - fidelity (path tracing is still to come!) but the console versions are great too, as you'll see here in Oliver Mackenzie's PS5, PS5 Pro and Xbox Series coverage.Watch on YouTube That said, having just played through Doom Eternal again in Nightmare mode while going for 100 percent completion, I still haven't decided yet if I will enjoy The Dark Ages as much as its predecessor. Once I finish a nightmare run, I can judge it - and for me, that's the ultimate test. Looking back, I was critical of Doom Eternal when I previewed The Dark Ages, but returning to the game and powering through the nightmare mode, it reminded me just how good it is. For now, I would say that Doom: The Dark Ages is at least on par in terms of quality, just different. Honestly, while playing the game, I couldn't help but think of adjacent games in Doom's past such as Heretic from Raven or even the original Quake. It has a dark fantasy ambience to the point that it feels like it could have been a sequel to one of those games as well. Still, overall, having replayed several of its missions multiple times, I'm fairly certain that this is going to occupy a similar space to other id Software classics. The moment you take over the Slayer, it's immediately clear that it feels better than nearly every other shooter on the market - the controls feel virtually flawless. I'm very happy with Doom: The Dark Ages overall and I'm pleased to see that id Tech is still delivering. While 60 fps has become much more common this generation, it's still amazing to see a game doing so much high-end rendering and physics while filling its gigantic stages with hordes of enemies while at the same time delivering a superb high frame-rate experience. As you might imagine, I highly recommend it - but we still haven't shared everything we want to about this defining game: we'll be back soon with a PC performance review, an interview with the developers and a look at the path tracing upgrade as soon as that becomes available. Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2025-doom-the-dark-ages-id-softwares-new-tech-is-a-defining-moment-for-this-generation #doom #the #dark #ages #software039s #latest #defining #moment #for #current #generation #technology

For 25 years the logo of middleware tech company Havok has graced the loading screens of big-budget games from across the industry. Its plugins drive the ragdoll and particle physics of games like Helldivers 2, its cloth simulation technology makes the capes of Destiny 2 flap in the wind, and its pathfinding tech helps the monstrosities of Elden Ring wander the The Lands Between.Despite how far its name has traveled, the company's kept a low profile in that time, letting its clients take the bulk of the credit for the boundary-pushing physics. But economic shifts in the industry seemed to drive the company to surface at the 2025 Game Developers Conference.At the event, Havok announced a new pricing model for developers working on budgets under $20 million. The company's normally high-end offerings haven't been affordable for many developers, and while they aren't ready to support low budget indies just yet, general manager David Cochrane told Game Developer that the company now wants to work with studios with "tens" of employees, not necessarily "hundreds."Developers on those lower budgets can now license tools like Havok Physics and Havok Navigation for the low low price of $50,000 per Havok product. There's no royalty fee, and studios can also use plug-in versions of the tools for Unreal Engine.Related:To see a company known for selling premium tools for big-budget games open up to the lower-tier market is quite a phenomenon—especially in an era where the biggest hits of 2025 include Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 and RuneScape Dragonwilds. Small games are becoming bigger hits—and to hear Cochrane tell it, Havok seems to be following the trend.Havok is the rare middleware company to last 25 yearsCochrane explained to Game Developer that Havok began planning the new pricing scheme after studying how many mid-sized studios were planning more ambitious games using Unreal Engine. Havok is a "good fit" for Unreal he said, and to see developers embracing the kinds of solutions Havok offers—but not being able to afford its offerings—began to shift their thinking.It's the kind of adaptation Havok has made repeatedly over the last 25 years, following what Cochrane described as the "creativity" of developers. But it's not the kind of creativity you might think of at first glance. Cochrane praised the gameplay advancements and new kinds of ideas that emerged from the last two-and-a-half decades, but the company's primary focus has been the creativity of technical problem-solving the industry has produced. "The industry has always found creative ways to deliver games that make the most of the of their chosen platform," he said, alluding to the ways developers adapt to online networking or "diversity of hardware." Most recently, he said Havok has paid close attention to the rise of powerful handheld devices like the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck—and how developers are making "new kinds of games" suited for those devices.Related:But not every trend Havok's been around for has stuck. He recalled the rise of early Facebook games around 2009-2012. If that trend had stayed around, Havok would have been in a tough spot since Facebook games don't need expensive physics or cloth simulation technology. "There was almost a sense of 'was the whole industry gonna have to pivot hard toward this?'" he recalled.It didn't. "There can be a new style of game that comes along—whether that's a live service, or whether it's a social game, or whatever—when MAU numbers are high, the whole industry will take notice, but the game industry always tends to drift back toward an equilibrium which involves many different types of games across many different platforms."So even with the surge of fast-followers for UGC games like Roblox and Minecraft—few of which need Havok's high-end physics and cloth technology—Cochrane said there will still be an audience for games gushing with plentiful particles.Related:The next space for innovation: AI navigationLike everyone else at GDC, Cochrane had a lot to say about AI—but not the same kind of AI that had everyone else aflutter.Cochrane explained that Havok's most overlooked product its its AI navigation tech—but it's also one the most quietly groundbreaking pieces in the company's portfolio. "What we're really seeing now is an increased diversity in the the scale of different characters that [players] come across in a game," he said. Games have had enormous enemies for years, but newer pathfinding tech allows gigantic creatures to share space with smaller in-game characters instead of having their own dedicated areas.Image via Havok.He referenced FromSoftware's Elden Ring here, a game where players can be fighting twisted knights in ruins one minute, then be ambushed by a dragon the next, often in the same area. It's not the only game in 2025 we've seen playing with new ideas of what NPCs should be doing in a game. Just hours later the folks at Bloober Team showed us the ambitious combat system of Cronos: The New Dawn, and earlier this year we were surprised by how the massive monsters of Eternal Strands were able to smoothly navigate through the game's open environments.He called this evolution a "common theme" across the industry—one that makes for a fascinating pairing with Havok's decision to chase smaller studios. "The reality is...the sizes of worlds that people are dealing with at the moment are stressing some of the historic techniques that would have been used to build [methods] for navigation," he said. "Some of the things we're doing is showing ways in which we can have very memory-efficient representations for navigation. We can allow characters to navigate across large worlds that might include streamed geometry in and out.""Now you won't actually hold the whole game world in memory at one point in time, but you still want NPCs that can actually navigate naturally through those larger environments. That's an area we're investing a lot in."Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa Tech. Source: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/25-years-in-havok-unveils-royalty-free-pricing-for-budgets-up-to-20-million #years #havok #unveils #royaltyfree #pricing #for #budgets #million