[erikpukinskis]

Off topic:

I'm interested in a physics library based on waveform collapse. It seems like performance would be so much better. A body could arc through empty space, without writing any new data to the GPU, just the clock changing, until an "observation" event where you wanted to check whether it interacted with anything, at which point you collapse some number of waveforms into particles, do rigid body math, and then generate new wave equations for the subsequent timeline. There would be no centralized "tick" just a tree of nested timelines forking whenever your code decided to do an observation. When rendering you'd just render all the waves, which means you can do arbitrary precision. You could do 90hz rendering of the waves for head position, while only collapsing particles every half second or so. Do that at multiple scales and you have a physics system with arbitrary fidelity traded off for performance. You can have different ticks at different scales (waves within waves). The properties of a given surface would just be the sum of maybe 3-4 waves at different levels of detail. You could collapse these independently depending on how much compute you wanted to devote at different levels. I think this would pair well with an SDF-based renderer, which lets you have screen-aligned surfaces that kind of act like particles already.

It would lead to bizarre physics bugs, but I suspect they would be very interesting and could lead to interesting gameplay. Perhaps they might even help us learn things about how our own universe works.