It's cool, but these tech demos for water always feel off to me. I think the viscosity is too low, or something.
PhysX Real-Time Fluid Physics Are Crazy Realistic
- Thread starter Steven Bogos
- Start date
One of the main benefits of this kind of tech isn't so much the quality or realism so much as the ability for designers to iterate faster.blink said:
Instead of having to precompute waterfalls and splashes and spend a whole bunch of time simulating/rendering/baking/etc, the developers can just do it all in real-time and spend more time making it look good and behave correctly, spend more time on the stuff that matters.
Instead of having to spend a bunch of time coming up with smoke and mirrors to make a corridor flood in Bioshock, they could just do it with real-time simulations and just be done with it, with the added bonus of letting the player be able to interact with it.
Or what about in a game like Half-Life 2, the fluid simulations could drive the physics, water washing away debris and corpses and stuff like that, have the boat be affected by waves, water physics puzzles, etc. Right now all those things have to be faked, and faking them correctly takes a lot of time.
Not to mention the fact that this same tech can be used for other things too, like lava simulations, smoke simulations, etc.
Now obviously these examples are larger in scale but it's only a matter of time. To say that all we're going to get is prettier water is a very narrow view when this is the kind of tech that entire games can be based on. Games which are impossible today, but quite possible in a near future. What's the hardware going to be like when the GTX Titan or GTX 690 eventually become low-end $100 GPUs?
Water interaction would be pretty cool beyond just watching it.
I can already imagine realistic flooding rooms in games like Half Life and The Legend of Zelda to be pretty awesome. I thought they handled swimming pretty well. Skyrim was kinda mechanical.
I can already imagine realistic flooding rooms in games like Half Life and The Legend of Zelda to be pretty awesome. I thought they handled swimming pretty well. Skyrim was kinda mechanical.
Never apologize for dissenting! You're not obligated to agree. You are only obligated to be convincing.blink said:
I think the game industry is going broke because developers think *every game* needs to push the graphical standard. I don't think R&D pushing the graphical envelope is causing anyone to go bankrupt. In fact, I think this push forward is not only desirable but necessary. Moore's law says that computing power will increase exponentially. What good will that do anyone if we do not seek to produce content better than PS3 era graphics? Some people, like me, are "techies." We LOVE seeing visuals presented in higher and higher fidelity. Some games are simply better than they would have been because their visuals were so impressive.
For example, when the first Aliens versus Predator came out on PC I could not play it for more than thirty minutes at a time because it frightened me so bad. Now I can play it for as long as I want. By today's standard, the fidelity and animation is so poor that it breaks me out of the experience and makes it almost comical. I had the same problem with Slender. However, if I try to play Amnesia I break down like a little girl. So, realize there exists consumers for who graphics do matter.
Lastly, tools will improve. It used to be we had to draw every polygon in place when making 3d models. Now we have tools that make that necessary, saving time. I expect out tools will continue to improve so that high fidelity content can be make in less time. Also, the subject of this thread, liquid physics, takes no time at all to implement. Same would go for advances in lighting, color, tessellation and shaders. Those are built into an engine and offer a great bang for your buck for developers, unlike high resolution textures and high polygon models which must be hand made.
Water physics can really make good gameplay mechanics, Hydrophobia while not being a very good game when you have to interact with water its fuckin amazing.
And this sort of stuff as long as its like a prefab that can be applied in multiple games I honestly dont see the problem with efforts going to graphics here. For example, the Unreal Engine 4 is supposed to look better and give more options to the developer while making work easier, faster and cheaper. And dont forget that a lot of features will be shared through multiple games, a weapon model is very likely to be a unique model for the a single game but a smoke particle effect or light engine is not and will be used multiple times. Just take a look at Frostbite 2, most of the work on the core of future games using that engine is already done.
And this sort of stuff as long as its like a prefab that can be applied in multiple games I honestly dont see the problem with efforts going to graphics here. For example, the Unreal Engine 4 is supposed to look better and give more options to the developer while making work easier, faster and cheaper. And dont forget that a lot of features will be shared through multiple games, a weapon model is very likely to be a unique model for the a single game but a smoke particle effect or light engine is not and will be used multiple times. Just take a look at Frostbite 2, most of the work on the core of future games using that engine is already done.