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Fluid Mechanics in Game Programming
- jws 19y agoThat's a nicely written, approachable article for those of us who have forgotten much of our university studies. I should add that anyone wanting to put fluid dynamics into their program might also wish to google about for papers on opengl and GPUs performing the calculations. To see a game that makes an interesting use of fluid dynamics you could look at pop-pop from Ambrosia Software. Completely ungamerelated, but the background of the playing field appears to be a fluid simulation reacting to the play elements. It is beautiful and slightly hypnotic. (Game was built in a day of slower CPUs. The blockiness of the simulation reflects this.)
- henning 19y agoIf you're implementing fluid dynamics in a piece of software you're selling for money, you owe it to yourself to install BioShock. It has awesome water in it - you stop and go, "wow, that looks like real water."
- billroberts 19y agoIn a previous life I spent a lot of time writing and working with software to solve partial differential equations to describe various types of fluid flow. It's a big and complex subject: very roughly speaking the accuracy of the simulation tends to be proportional to the amount of computer power and time spent on it. A really interesting question in the context of fluid dynamics for games is what is the simplest thing you can do which makes the movement of a fluid look realistic, without worrying about all the details of mass conservation, numerical diffusion etc etc that cause the computational fluid dynamicists to pull their hair out.