Displacement of water?

Questions & Answers
1

Ever play Terraria? The first thing you notice as a developer is amazing water system.

I am currently working on a water system myself and might possibly submit to unity themselves if it finishes strong enough and they don’t have a water system (this system is volume and metric water with physics displacement and able to be formed with splines) finished at all.

My goal is to also create this without making the million polly pond (because of the water polly count).

I also understand if I make it for unity that I should set the bar really high.

Here are my starting lines.

Edited rigidbidy class - just for
water

Restraint calculations - for the
water if chosen to be restrained

Less strenuous cycle hogging - use
of fixed update

Editable Shaders - for different
looks.

Built-in water controller - for
when inside water.

Reaction/Displacement - reactions to
if any volume enters or exits the
water.

So my question is how do I make a water (volume) unit without creating a mesh with 16 pollys on it for hat single unit?

2

3D fluid simulation is still rare in games, even with the powerful GPUs we have, simply because it is incredibly resource-intensive. Valve did it for Portal 2, but it was very limited and far from being used on large bodies of water.

Nvidia published an article about realtime 3D fluid simulation as part of it’s GPU Gems series. It’s very technical but gives a good idea of what’s involved in good fluid simulation : http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch30.html