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Guess this explains why water effects in Minecraft are bit kludgy. It isn't so simple.
I always thought animal crossing had a clever and efficient approach to this without any terrain manipulation. You can chop a tree, and it'll dispense logs, but only so many before it essentially has a cooldown. You get the feedback and the finite resources, without expensive terrain manipulation.
Of course that doesn't work for every game, and really works better on smaller maps, but something worth considering. Terrain manipulation is pretty expensive, if your game doesn't need it it's probably better to do without (again, a generalisation)
Off topic, but the post mentions needing terrain manipulation for resource gathering. I always thought animal crossing had a clever and efficient approach to this without any terrain manipulation. You can chop a tree, and it'll dispense logs, but only so many before it essentially has a cooldown. You get the feedback and the finite resources, without expensive terrain manipulation. Of course that doesn't work for eve…
It a standard strategy for resource dispensation (though cooldown doesn’t alleviate the infinite resource problem; it just slows it down), it’s just… boring and unimpactful
I was experimenting with a similar idea recently with the help of o3-mini-high. I talked it through my idea for an algorithm, and it implemented and rendered it in 3D with no manual intervention (although I did prompt it a number of times):
https://3d-water-sim.netlify.app/
It's not perfect yet because I stopped playing with it, but it was improving significantly with each iteration.
Fun fact, it implemented a working version of perlin noise correctly from scratch instead of pulling it from a CDN or something as part of this, for the terrain generation.
The waves when the water is first entering the area is called numeric dispersion, it's a consequence of discretizing. It can be mitigated somewhat by smoothing the entering wall of water so that there's not a sharp discontinuity.
In this setup one edge update affects two cells, so the cells are no longer trivially independent. It's still possible to update cells in parallel, but it requires splitting the update into two checkerboard-like passes.
Storing values at the edges of cells makes the math simpler, but unfortunately makes a GPU implementation harder. In this setup one edge update affects two cells, so the cells are no longer trivially independent. It's still possible to update cells in parallel, but it requires splitting the update into two checkerboard-like passes.
The waves when the water is first entering the area is called numeric dispersion, it's a consequence of discretizing. It can be mitigated somewhat by smoothing the entering wall of water so that there's not a sharp discontinuity.
See e.g. the classic exposition by Leveque:
https://www.clawpack.org/riemann_book/html/Shallow_water.htm...