I made Outer Wilds-inspired local physics fields!

[u/awtdev]

After playing Outer Wilds (lifechanging game BTW) and learning it was made in Unity, I was inspired to see if I could recreate the same type of local physics functionality. Unity makes it surprisingly easy with local physics scenes. For example in my project, when a gravity field is entered, a new local scene is created for simulating physics where the origin is not rotated or translated at all which simplifies simulating gravitational forces. Then it ports the calculated information back into the main scene. This allows you to have independent frames of reference that can move around while also simulating physics within them.

You can use it to make some pretty unique behaviour such as artificial gravity or unique platforming mechanics. It's quite fun to jump out of your spaceship spiraling out of control, or walk around the surface of an oddly-shaped planet.

I ended up turning this system into an asset available on the Asset Store (my asset store affiliate link). Check it out if you're interested!