This is not a criticism, just an observation: it looks like what I imagine an ocean of hot corn syrup would look like (after dyeing it blue). The viscosity seems right; possibly the surface tension is not what ocean water would have (a colloid of salty H2O and biomaterial, which is common in real-world experience but quite ugly for computational fluid dynamics).
Also note that the ocean spray here is a post-hoc effect, but for a real ocean the spray dulls the sharpness of the waves in a way that will be (vaguely) apparent visually.
Of course there's almost no "physics" in this elegant, simple, and highly effective model, so I want to emphasize that suggesting directions to poke around and try things should not be construed as an armchair criticism.
A) It would be a criticism if I thought these effects could be plausibly rendered with a similar FFT algorithm, but that seems unlikely to me. I think these results are "highly effective" given the toolset, which is not attempting to emulate the actual physics.
B) This project is not an all-out attempt to make lifelike water, it is described as an experiment. I am making an observation about the result of the experiment, not criticizing the project for failing to meet standards it wasn't holding itself to.
But ultimately, does that model model vortexes or other fluid dynamics?
Can this model a fluid vortex between 2-liter bottles with a 3d-printable plastic connector?
Curl, nonlinearity, Bernoulli, Navier-Stokes, and Gross-Pitaevskii are known tools for CFD computational fluid dynamics with Compressible and Incompressible fluids.
Keep in mind that this project is aimed at video game developers, not oceanographers :) The point is to get something cheap and plausible, not to solve Navier-Stokes with finite element methods.
Maybe you can adjust the parameters of the tool to get waves like this, or perhaps I still should care even if the solution isn't realistic, and getting such an effect is hard by just using an arbitrary formula. In particular getting the detail right, but I imagine the recorded video is heavily subdivided and takes most of the resources that you just can't spend on a real video game.
It's still impressive, but I can't help but wonder why the formal maths if you don't arrive at anything realistic - perhaps because I'm a layman and I don't understand the difficulties of achieving this.
Also note that the ocean spray here is a post-hoc effect, but for a real ocean the spray dulls the sharpness of the waves in a way that will be (vaguely) apparent visually.
Of course there's almost no "physics" in this elegant, simple, and highly effective model, so I want to emphasize that suggesting directions to poke around and try things should not be construed as an armchair criticism.