That said, using Game Thread state is not necessarily bad. It is the state the rest of the game/engine code sees and uses. Therefore that is the state to use if you are working with other game data (in fact, in these cases you probably don’t need to use the async physics tick either, just the normal tick).
Thanks for pointing that out. That aligns with my understanding. I use the Game Thread state whenever displaying information on the HUD or driving sound and animation parameters.
What is your use for the Async Physics tick?
I’m developing a flight simulator. Every physics tick, I retrieve the current state of the physics particle representing the aircraft, calculate the aerodynamic forces and torques, and apply them. Doing this on the game thread tick introduces instabilities in the calculations.
If you need to do work at the physics step level, the current recommended way to do it is by implementing your own sim callback. The Async Physics Tick has a non-trivial performance impact.
Would implementing a custom simulation callback be beneficial for my use case? I’m unsure what advantages that would have compared to using async physics ticks. The lack of documentation also makes it an obscure option when compared to the simplicity of async physics ticks.
Again, thanks for helping! 