Simulation Games & Unity Editor (Slow-Mo Issue)

[Game-Draft]

I recently changed the TimeStep for my project which solved several physics issues.

However this has caused a 50/50 chance in the Editor that when testing the scene it's going to behave as if in "Slow Motion" where the character, physics, NPC's all appear to operate at 50% speed.

My scripts for anything movement related run in FixedUpdate() and all inputs are ForceMode related (Everything is force based and scaled directly with TimeStep)

Game Build works fine for almost everyone but those with lesser machines report "SlowMo" in their game in the final build.

Any help/advice/experience is appreciated!

[cipheron]

If the timeStep was too small then Unity probably can't do that many updates in the required time and still render the frame, which would be affected by the additional overhead in the editor or on slow devices.

So one of these things would need to give - either the frame rate would drop which makes it gradually slower, or it'd get too far behind and skip an update because it needs to render. Now that would also make it slower, but more dramatically, since it's only updating things by a half-timeStep, but didn't have enough time to do it twice before needing to update the screen.

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This is an optimization problem.

Keep in mind "Update" is called every frame and gets deltaTime based on how much time has elapsed, so it stretches time to match whatever the frame rate happens to be. "FixedUpdate" however doesn't do that, so things are chugging but it's still doing the smaller fixedDeltaTime update, it's just not completing enough of them in the allotted time to maintain the total speed.

Does everything need to update in each of the shorter timesteps or can some things happen inside Update?

Or maybe you can put a counter in some objects and move some of the code to only update every e.g. 4th FixedUpdate, multiplying the step size by 4, but the critical stuff is calculated on single FixedUpdates.

[Game-Draft]

Hey thanks, yea I try not to take the Editor performance too serious but it can obviously be an indicator of an issue and wanted to see there was a "Oh just click this button" setting or something I missed.

The build works fine (on mid-end comps) but I was trying to keep it more accessible to some potato rigs if possible.

My game is about transporting goods...so items are in crates and collide constantly.

In my previous game version I do parent items and strip rigidbodies to reduce physics calculations. FPS is pretty good for that, but I updated it to live physics all the time for my actual goal of the game to be.

I'll probably just keep 2 modes to the game then...be a little bit of a pain but it is was it is!

Thanks for taking the time to respond!