[aithrowawaycomm]

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.

[hackable_sand]

This is literally a criticism.

[aithrowawaycomm]

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.

[westurner]

Neat that FFT yields great waves.

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.

"Ocean waves grow way beyond known limits" (2024-09) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631177#41631975

"Gigantic Wave in Pacific Ocean Was the Most Extreme 'Rogue Wave' on Record" (2024-09) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41548417#41550654

[aithrowawaycomm]

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.

[fartsucker69]

criticism can be positive, neutral or negative.

[CognitiveLens]

This not a criticism, but the comment you are replying to is a critique, not a criticism.

[Etherlord87]

What sad times do we live in, that you need to defensively remark you're not making a criticism as if criticism was bad?

I found a video that records (in a few places) how the waves actually look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XBO-hen7_s

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.