
Fluid Mechanics in Game Programming - iamelgringo
http://cowboyprogramming.com/2008/04/01/practical-fluid-mechanics/
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jws
That's a nicely written, approachable article for those of us who have
forgotten much of our university studies.

I should add that anyone wanting to put fluid dynamics into their program
might also wish to google about for papers on opengl and GPUs performing the
calculations.

To see a game that makes an interesting use of fluid dynamics you could look
at pop-pop from Ambrosia Software. Completely ungamerelated, but the
background of the playing field appears to be a fluid simulation reacting to
the play elements. It is beautiful and slightly hypnotic. (Game was built in a
day of slower CPUs. The blockiness of the simulation reflects this.)

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billroberts
In a previous life I spent a lot of time writing and working with software to
solve partial differential equations to describe various types of fluid flow.
It's a big and complex subject: very roughly speaking the accuracy of the
simulation tends to be proportional to the amount of computer power and time
spent on it.

A really interesting question in the context of fluid dynamics for games is
what is the simplest thing you can do which makes the movement of a fluid
_look_ realistic, without worrying about all the details of mass conservation,
numerical diffusion etc etc that cause the computational fluid dynamicists to
pull their hair out.

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henning
If you're implementing fluid dynamics in a piece of software you're selling
for money, you owe it to yourself to install BioShock. It has awesome water in
it - you stop and go, "wow, that looks like real water."

