9 comments

  • nlawalker 1 hour ago

    If you haven't tried Animal Well, give it a shot. The whole game and its custom engine are like 35MB and it's filled with really cool visuals and physics powered by fluid equations.

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/813230/ANIMAL_WELL/

    • markstock 24 minutes ago

      Before you go adding vorticity confinement, consider performing a higher-order backward advection scheme (Runge-Kutta 2nd or similar), and using a higher-order interpolation method (triangle-shaped cloud instead of bilinear).

      In my implementations I use 4th order for both and vortices stick around a lot longer.

      • genxy 1 hour ago

        The unlinked Jos Stam paper is available from his website https://www.dgp.toronto.edu/public_user/stam/reality/Researc...

        • myzek 3 days ago

          So once upon a time I stumbled upon simulating fluids in gamedev and I really wanted to learn how it works. Fast forward 2 months and I decided to write down everything I learned to hopefully make it easier for others in the future!

          • magicalhippo 3 days ago

            Fluid sims are just so darn fun! Nice writeup, very accessible.

            Couple of notes, I think you forgot to apply timestep when adding rocket exhaust velocity, pretty sure it should be

              u[idx] += backward.x * flame_velocity_amount * falloff * delta
              v[idx] += backward.y * flame_velocity_amount * falloff * delta
            
            You need to compensate by scaling up flame_velocity_amount, I used 85, seemed about the same.
            • myzek 3 days ago

              Yeah it seems I missed that, adding the rocket at the end was a cherry on the top and I was so exhausted already I'm surprised it even works lol

          • brandonpelfrey 1 hour ago

            Great job. I have spent a lot of time working on fluid simulations (I still am). Glad to see more people still mesmerized. If you’re interested, this rabbit hole goes very deep.

            • nick__m 2 hours ago

              excellent article, great vulgarisation and human written !

              Thank you

            • amarant 45 minutes ago

              This is great! When I have some leftover time I want to try copying this implementation for 3D. I reckon I could get away with minimal modifications to support the third axis...I think...

              That'll perform even worse though, hopefully my CPU can handle it or I'm gonna need a lot of leftover time to make a shader

              • markstock 27 minutes ago

                You are correct: Stable Fluids extends to 3d relatively easily.

              • Stevvo 2 hours ago

                For anyone wanting to dive further, Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics by Robert Bridson is the definitive textbook.

                • amelius 2 hours ago

                  Did they test if it satisfies the relevant conservation laws?

                  • brandonpelfrey 1 hour ago

                    It won’t satisfy those laws. It’s also not a goal though of this post.

                    • amelius 1 hour ago

                      I mean if you're writing a ray tracer and the reflected light has more intensity than the light sources, then that's not desired. You can have the same sort of thing going on with a fluid simulation.

                      • markstock 28 minutes ago

                        One of the nice aspects of Stable Fluids is that you don't need to iterate the pressure correction terms to convergence. Just run a fixed number of Jacobi or Gauss-Seidel sweeps and keep performance consistent. The only drawback of this is some mass loss in areas, which for the present purposes is acceptable.

                  • frankdlc222 3 days ago

                    This is really cool. I love how much detail you went into explaining the setup and walking through each piece of the simulation. Definitely bookmarking this to play around with later!

                    • analog8374 2 hours ago

                      Oh don't let us pinch zoom. That would be a disaster.

                      • zamadatix 2 hours ago

                        Assuming you mean the site - pinch zoom & pan works for me on Windows and iOS?