About Hovercraft Physics – Unity Editor Tool & Plugin
Version 1.1 of **Hovercraft Physics** delivers a raycast-driven suspension framework designed to integrate natively with Unity's PhysX engine. By ing traditional wheel colliders and static geometry dragging, the architecture calculates independent spring and damper forces directly at specific thruster coordinates during the `FixedUpdate` cycle using `Rigidbody.AddForceAtPosition`. The system relies on a modular control pipeline split into distinct script responsibilities. An orchestrator script gathers user inputs, handles engine states, and distributes energy to individual nodes. Meanwhile, individual thruster components cast rays or spheres toward surface geometry, applying Hooke's Law alongside velocity-based damping to maintain stable vertical lift. Tuning profiles are handled through a ScriptableObject structure that manages rest heights, spring stiffness, coefficients for damping, lateral friction curves, and automated pitch or roll alignment torques. Designed for performance, the physics routines prevent heap memory allocation by utilizing pre-allocated buffers with non-allocating physics sweep queries, ensuring zero runtime garbage collection during active calculations. This makes the tool well-suited for scenes featuring high vehicle counts.
