As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.

My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

Speculation as well: Looking at the trailer for Bitcraft, it looks like they have articulated characters and cloth physics. This raises more questions for me.

"What engine does BitCraft use? The BitCraft client is developed using the Unity game engine. For the server, we have developed a sophisticated distributed system called SpacetimeDB, which hosts the entirety of BitCraft’s server architecture. "

Correct me if wrong, but this suggests the physics engine is Unity's, and not something implemented in SpacetimeDB.

If that is the case I would really like to see some internals of how the physics engine has been implemented in their pattern. I'm not asking for the rapier port source code, but it is hard to think in terms of a new advertised programming paradgim when there's no working examples.

For example I am very curious to see how a constraint solve is implemented in a SQL-like fashion. You would need various math operations and an efficient matrix representation off the top of my head, and I can't think of how that maps to a SQL-like interface.

Game physics involves a lot of things (solvers, collision detection, numerical stability, etc.). I am skeptical of their claims of being able to run physics in what I understand are stored procedures for their database.

I looked at their docs for physics https://spacetimedb.com/docs/unity/part-4 where they demonstrate the simplest form of collision check (sphere overlap). I fail to see how that is an improvement or speedup over existing methods. Some quotes: "This may not be the most efficient way to do collision checking (building a quad tree or doing spatial hashing might be better), but SpacetimeDB is very fast so for this number of entities it'll be a breeze for SpacetimeDB." >> Nothing is quantified with numbers.

"For every circle, we look at all other entities." >> This is the most inefficient N^2 way you could do collision detection.

And not to mention networked physics is a whole additional layer of complexity, where you have to use some form of prediction techniques and very likely end up changing your core physics code to accommodate this.

All of this suggests to me much thought has not been put into the claim "you can also do physics with it!" and its implications. Perhaps it is enough for extremely simple physics, as demonstrated with their demo game. If the author is reading this, I suggest spending some time understanding what this claim implies and qualifying it better.

However I must mention that I applaud their courage to try something so outlandish. If you truly believe your claims are possible, I encourage you to keep working on it.

But I'll be convinced when extraordinary evidence backs extraordinary claims.

Source: I work on a commercial game physics engine and related netcode.

If anyone else is interested in a graduate degree in this field, I recommend doing something similar - I simply made a few reasonable PRs to fix some issues that I found when following along the books.