Source limitations: Water + Gravity.. ?

[Spiffae]

thing is that even though it's true that no one can make realistic real-time fluid dynamics in game, they can fake it well. Look at games like Max Payne, IL-2 Sturmovik, and most notably Metal Gear Solid 2, to see how good simple sprites and polygons can look. I'm betting that HL2 will use even better tech, so i think we can expect really nice splashes, rivers, waterfalls, etc.

 

[NiteStalker]

There are quite many of these threads, isn't it?

BTW, what do you talk about when you say most PCs can't handle it?
Ever played Silent Hunter II? It's a sub sim, and the water is dynamic. The game is quite old, but yet it looks nice. That yould even work on grandpas computer

 

[marksmanHL2 :)]

Dynamic water is a imposiblity on todays home computers, i doubt it would run on many supoer computers lol
Simply cos it would take so long to program in as an effect.

Think about it every single water partical would have to be affected by the world phsyics. Now we are all super impressed by hl2s physics and most of us know that this engine puts a large amount of pressure on the CPU. Imagaine that for the water, where thousends and posibily millions of particals would be affected, not just that falling beam.

See what i mean.

Those effects with the barrels were coded in (very cleverly)


There might be a way to code in dynamic physics useing something other than partical physics.
For example a routine that simply maps the surface of water onto any suface it meets and keeps track of its volume at the same so it is able to spread without expanding. A near impossiblity to program and not worth the time or effort for the shaby results u would resieve. There would be countless errors


The HL2 team have been very inteligent while making this game (obviously) By manageing to fool people into believeing that this sort of effect is possible in HL2.
As evidence that this effect is not in HL2 is that of the two videos that are of the water serpent thing that i cant remember the name of. I have seen both. And in one u see the combine trooper getting stabed without any splashes from the water. And in the other there are splashes and clever partical effects. If they had done dynamic water effects then the splases could have been created by this, instead of partical effects.


( just trust me on this please i am tired )


g2g now knackered

 

[Skull]

I want to know if there will be "swimming". Some of the more intense parts of the 1st one was the underwater action with the great big fishy thing.

Oh yes indeed! :bounce:
me and my friend used to call it "the toilet", and please, dont ask me why..

If you've read so much about it, then you would have seen that the one saying that about the watertank never was serious and is now banned, not for that, but anyway.

I don't recall quoting any specific poster, I think I made that example up myself. But it was, as I said, one example of many.. :dozey:

THIS THREAD IS HEREBY CLOSED!

 

[Murray_H]

/me uses his skeleton key to open up the thread again

*working on data given from a website (www.page3.com )

Around 200,000,000 atoms can fit into 1cm of space. So in 1cm cubed of a monatomic liquid, there would be around 8000000000000000000000000 atoms. There would be slightly less for water (molecules - take up more space). There would still be a shed load of molecules to calculate per-particle real-time dynamic water - something which a P4 cannot even dream of handling

 

[Skull]

haha
good to know ...but there MUST be a way to simplify the creation of realistic water.. the less atoms (particles), the less realistic it behaves..
guess this thread isn't closed just yet

 

[The Mullinator]

The best way you could probably "fake" realistic water would be to have the surface of the water as a deformable mesh, that would simulate the waves, and then have one amazingly good physics system to tell it how to deform properly depending on the wind and objects that it might hit (pier in the water). Then you would also need a really good particle system to go along with it. This would create some really realistic looking water and although is not attainable by current high end PC's it is probably not that far off.

EDIT: Making water by the use of the individual atoms is something well beyond any level of computing power we can even think of right now. You could maybe expect to begin seeing something like that several years after the first desktop Quantum computer is released.

 

[Draklyne]

If someone programmed liquid physics, couldn't you theoretically make all other materials behave correctly? Most materials move like liquid, just a lot slower. Metal moves like petrified water. When you shoot it, it would make a "splash", except the splash would be a bullet hole.

Anyway, I probably don't know what I'm talking about, so go on.

 

[The Mullinator]

No No, your probably right Draklyne, I never thought about making some materials that way. You certainly couldn't make wood in this form but certainly metal could be done that way. I don't think its something that will be seen in games, but maybe simulations with other purposes.

Of course it would be a good way to have an enemy made out of solid metal when you first look at him and then have him start to move and attack you and still take on all of the properties of the metal object he was made from.

 

[Wesisapie]

You all need to remember that even though computers may end up infinitely powerful, they still need to be programmed by humans, and in the end we will have all our talents maxed out (like a credit card, hehe ben kweller) and yeah. there'll be a point where graphical progress will be so slow it will be negligable.

 

[The Mullinator]

That is where computers with Neural networks come in. The goal with these computers is to make them intelligent by having them compute things the way the human brain does and then "teaching them to become intelligent". Think HAL from 2001. By the time we end up with computers capable of calculating scenes at the molecular level we would probably have already gotten computers capable of writing their own software.

Me wonders... Computers writing computer games for us. They would be super fast at it, no budget limitations, they would theoretically know everything that they should do to make it fun. It would be practically free of any bugs. Tis something to think about.

 

[EVIL]

I just saw some program on rebot's on discovery. was pretty interesting.. there was a guy that made robot's with a neuralnetwork or something.. so if you kill one transistor the robot still keeps going.. (if you would do this in your CPu then you can trow it away)

 

[Wesisapie]

Yeah, that's getting ever closer to a computer with consciousness. Which is something you'd have to tread very carefully around.

 

[Lazarus]

Modelling the flow of water under gravity would be an enormous amount of computation. You could fake it, in very simple environments (simple geometry to flow into), but the idea of shooting a container and having water flowing out and splashing around it probably a ways away.

I'm pretty happy that they implemented "real" physics for solid objects. That will definitely give us something to work with for a few years. I would expect too much out of water.

 

[simmo]

Morrowind has some very nice looking water

 

[The Mullinator]

Morrowinds water does look good, of course its also geometrically flat just like HL2's, it also loses points for not being reflective like HL2's is going to be.

 

[A.A]

All water in ALL games look bad where the water meets the shore/land/other. When a game can make good waves or splashing water against land, then I will be happy.