[munificent]

I'm not in gamedev anymore (and didn't do graphics when I was), but my vague impression is that real-time fluid simulation has become more common over the past decade, and I think that's what you're describing as "physics" here and is what makes point-based VFX actually look cool.

Without a fluid sim, point-based particle systems just look like fireworks. It was a cool effect in, like, the early 90s, but is is passe today.

The next step up from that is having each particle move independently with its own physics (some momentum, maybe a little wandering around from "wind", etc.) but then rendering them using little texture billboards. That's what games did up until relatively recently and looks pretty good for explosions, smoke, etc.

But now machines are powerful enough and physics algorithms clever enough to actually do fluid simulation in real-time where the particles all interact with each other. I think that's what you're seeing now.

[Macuyiko]

Very interesting, indeed, they seem to be driven by better fluid simulations... remarkable that they find their way into games. I was always under the impression that Navier Stokes was hard in 3d, but it does seem like there are performant solutions now that are easily offloaded to the GPU, e.g. https://github.com/chrismile/cfd3d (and NVIDIA also has some blog posts about it).

Edit: I also just found this: https://www.youtube.com/live/569oSOSoKDc?si=8V5buRMoI3IKqLQp... -- which is very close to what you describe and fully matches the kind of particle systems I was hinting at, thanks!

[xoranth]

Do you have any example of particle systems without fluid sim? (e.g. videos on youtube from old games, or names of old games that used them?)

[wlesieutre]

Engine rather than a game, this video about UE4's particle system shows a lot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXK2Xbd7D9w

[aqfamnzc]

The first thing that came to my mind was Portal 2, the "you can't portal here" shower of sparks when you're spamming the gun in the elevators. :)