Cocos Creator 3.1 Brings PhysX Physics And Multi-threading

We were very excited to share with you the significant upgrade of 3D into Cocos Creator for 3.0. Being able to render 3D in our product and keep everything open source was a fantastic achievement for the team, and we’ve had a lot of excited developers building with it. But just having 3D probably isn’t massive enough news these days.

But with 3.1, we’re very excited to add a few new features that you would expect to see as cutting-edge technology inside our latest update. We really are excited we’ve been able to get many of these new features in and are pushing for even more in the next few updates.

If you want a complete list of our developer’s notes, check it out on the forums page.

PhysX support

Since Physx started as a video processing card, you added to your computer to improve video processing speeds to become a part of NVidia, launching to open-source, this crazy ride for one of the greatest physics engines in the world.

With the middleware now being available as open-source, we’ve been working very hard since the early days of 3D development to add it to Cocos Creator.  Our team’s impressive feat now allows you the power of showing off amazing Newtonian physics effects like clothing simulations, destruction of game worlds, and insane particle systems in your next game.

Physx is only available for Android (excluding Android x86), iOS (excluding M1 environment), and PC and can really improve performance for your games, as shown in this chart of iOS:

Also, thanks to the Huawei HiSillcon Team. They have contributed the deferred render pipeline to our open-source engine that has already shown great promise. We’re currently building a demo that will be shown off this power in the coming months as well as a blog post on the technology.

Multi-Thread Rendering

Another big thing is multithread rendering process has been introduced to the Cocos engine. Not only have we divided the rendering process into main threads (render thread and device thread), but we also are submitting command buffers in parallel. Amazing job team!

Improvements with the curve editor

We’ve revamped the curve editor to allow more customization on both the left and right slopes.

Octhadral bone visualization

For those doing animation inside the editor, you can now see where the joints are and how they are connected. They aren’t editable (Best to edit within your 3D modeling software) but are easier to see how your actions are happening.

3D animation inspector

Now you can see how fbx and glTF animation is doing before adding them into your project. View the animation from the inspector panel.

Other upgrades

• Android x86_64 architecture support
• Support adding/removing components on a prefab instance.
• Added support for the M1 chips in the Mac build.
• Add scene instant cache, which is enabled by default, and can restore data after the scene exits abnormally.
• Add ui-curve and ui-curve-editor components to plug-in development.