Open sourcing Flex?

[trsh]

Would Nvidia consider open sourcing all of Flex code?

Since it's abandoned in favor of PhysX new particle system, which is, as I understood, a work from ground up, I see no Cons open sourcing Flex.

The community could take over, make forks, add new backends like Vulkan, fix issues, add new features, etc. Everybody who likes and wants to use Flex, wins. Otherwise it just rots for nothing and we all lose, and its just sad.

I do not see the new PhysX particle system as a replacement for Flex. I tried it and it lacks features from here. But the worst part is the Cuda only factor, what literally kills ability to ship products cross platform and cross gpu.

P.S. I know Flex did not get enough usage from gaming and interactive app sectors, but probably just because it existed ahead of its time, which is like now, because of the advancement of GPU hardware & GPU physics becoming more and more actual.

[trsh]

@mmacklin 29 up votes :)

[Naitrate]

I'd agree, it would be great if the rest of the Flex code was open sourced. That way, more games can implement it.

[andtomek]

@amoravanszky any chance now for open-sourcing Flex GPU source code when PhysX/Flow GPU code got released?

[korzen]

This would be great as a reference implementation! You can have a look at dFlex (although in Python) https://github.com/imgeorgiev/DiffRL/tree/main/dflex