Help What Asset to Buy (if any) for Fishing Net style effect?

[josemendez]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to create a mobile game that involves having a net in which objects are placed inside. The net grows over the course of the game. The net also doesn't need to look super realistic or have a lot of density, but should sway a little bit and behave/look relatively satisfying/interesting.

I have been looking at Obi Cloth or Obi Rope to potentially implement this, as I am not getting far with the basic Unity toolset.

Is there any recommendations on what I should look at? Is what I am doing even possible with the current state of Unity and mobile hardware (especially in a way that it is performant on most devices)?

Appreciate any information - thanks!

Hi there!

ObiCloth would be the way to go. Implementing a net using a rope for each individual thread would be extremely costly and not very robust. Video of net implemented with ObiCloth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaQSkTvGyHU

Video of a "bag" containing spherical objects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luiUs7hSjJs

Whether it's possible to do or not depends on many factors, many of them apply regardless of the physics engine you use:

- What kind of colliders are used for the objects inside the net? Are primitives (cubes, spheres, capsules) enough, or do you need more complex shapes? 
- How many objects in the net, at most?
- How "snappy" should the simulation be, and are fast moving objects a requisite?
- What kind of interaction should take place between the user and the net, if any?

Concave objects are much more expensive to collide against (MeshColliders), the amount of objects and contacts between them affects performance, timestep length determines simulation quality vs performance, large mass ratios are difficult to deal with, fast moving objects can result in tunneling, etc.

These issues are at the core of how computers work (they're digital, and so must work with discretized versions of real-world continuous quantities), and so all physics engines are limited by these in one way or another.