WebGL Fluid Simulation (opens in new tab)

There's this paper which describes a simplified fluid dynamics appropriate for games: Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games by Jos Stam. You can find the paper and implementations by searching. It's based around numerical stability and speed, rather than accuracy. I think it would be interesting to put this into a simcity-like game to get good air pollution maps.

I'm not sure if this WebGL page is based around this algorithm.

Parallax occlusion mapping is quite heavy itself, though. Transparent layers stacked on top of each other are also quite expensive due to overdraw.

Probably the cheapest way to add a little bit of 3D-ness would be to write the fluid sim to a texture, use it as a height map, and sample the texture a second time while offsetting the uvs slightly based on height map and camera position. Still not a great solution, and would probably only work if it was a wall of fluid in front of you.

I recently came across EmberGen which seems to offer real-time volumetric fluid simulation [1] and I wonder what's driving it and whether it's down to the hardware, algorithm or something else?

1. https://youtu.be/iDqWLwYhd9Y

I am interested. Thank you very much. Out of curiosity, why LÖVE? For thr added features?

macOS?

This is IMO a more relevant question than it seems. You'd think so, but it's absurdly rare to see real-world uses of demo techniques like this (not only talking about fluid-sims, here). I long wondered why this is (easy answer: because it's hard).

These things are often designed to run very efficiently and getting maximum effect out of limited hardware and memory. It's perfect for, say, a small indie game looking for a cool background effect or something. I'm sure there's examples, but I couldn't even come up with one.

I wrote a game based on Jos Stam's Fluid Dynamics approach 2 years ago [1]. But without any GPU acceleration. It was also discussed on Hacker News [2]. There you can also find links of other computer games which uses fluid dynamics.

[1] https://github.com/s-macke/Interplanetary-Postal-Service

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17993933

https://sandspiel.club/ Uses fluid dynamics to simulate air flow

I forked this with the intention of adding a music visualizer. I never got around to the visualization part, but I did add a few more features, a Soundcloud player, and typescript type annotations:

https://github.com/justjake/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation

If you want to make one, and you know C++ and Direct3D 11, you can fork this and implement one more effect: https://github.com/Const-me/vis_avs_dx

It’s a plugin for old winamp so the music part is handled quite well there. The code already uses non-trivial amount of compute shaders, e.g. gaussian blur effect: https://github.com/Const-me/vis_avs_dx/tree/master/avs_dx/Dx...

Me too! I forked this and started annotating the code with Typescript types to understand it. My intention was to eventually make a music visualizer, but I paused work to focus on other things.

https://github.com/justjake/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation

So much yes.

To be fair, first gen iPad also had apps like this. Not 15 years but...

And android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=games.paveldog...

Also, last years discussion of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963640

I tried the app. Why isn’t the animation quality as nice as the web version?

Works fine for me. I'm on 79.0

One of the all-time great tripping activities, along with Rainbox (http://www.axlrosen.net/rainbox/rainbox-large.html) and Audiosurf