Hello!

After a few days figuring out Mastodon with the help of the folks at QOTO, I will formally introduce myself in order to pin this in my profile :)

My name is Abde and I am a computer scientist. My main domain is and . I am currently a PhD student at the Université Libre de Bruxelles () and working on porting numerical solvers for simulations on the GPU using . You may find my first paper here: etna.math.kent.edu/vol.55.2022

Other research interests are

I also work as a developer. My current professional interests are . We also contribute in several projects. Most of my work is done in , so feel free to ask any questions!

As a hobby I do some and also . I will share some snippets of what I do here, but for now I am focusing in crafting my art by producing in .

Please enjoy! I am not the most active but I am looking to build my Mastodon network, so feel free to follow and I will follow back :)

@abde "...feel free to ask any questions!" I am content if you can redirect me to someone "adjacent" within your field, but is there any notion of "hydrodynamic simulation" within games? By this, I mean has a fixed ocean level, no tides. Rivers are created at the same level. "Erosion" is "Kinda-sorta" implemented in terrain generation. Ark:Survival Evolved's terrain is all human crafted with a water plane set for a given area. , same as : Terrain generation with water at a set plane. SimCity iterations, same.

Would you know of work being done to have lakes over oceans, streams, flooding due to weather, tides, and so on? I would love to see this be more common in games featuring terrain generation.

@Romaq this is a complex question, I would be glad to answer it tomorrow evening! Not an expert, but can give some tips.

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@abde Thank you! I'm *far* from being in that business except as someone who plays games and thinks about terrain. I think such simulation may be "prohibitively expensive," but as that is *not* my wheelhouse, it's cool to ask someone for whom it *is.*

Basically, is dynamic hydrology "somewhere out in the future" for games? Is it *really* that expensive? Do developers figure it's simply not worth bothering with? Perhaps nobody would really notice?

I *will* say that has the ocean behavior I only *WISH* Ark Survival had. , you can place water where you think it ought to be to create the appearance you are looking for in terrain. But... still, I don't know unless I ask. :)

@Romaq Well, now I have some time.

The thing is that I'm not a scientist in or , so I don't think I can help, but here are my assumptions with a approach.

What I can see about that is that it can be challenging to have different "bodies of water" with different heights, tides, etc... The thing is that when you have a fixed value for things in general, you don't have to do tests about things that can be underwater or not...

"if position.y < water_level: swimming"

If you start adding more complex bodies of water, you can have to implement detection which can be pretty expensive.

In in general we rarely use real simulations, so we try to model things in a simple way to make it performant and make it "look good" with transformations on water, etc.you can check how Sea of Thieves deals with water:

youtube.com/watch?v=EMb_FUmr0T

has the effects you look for like tides etc.

There are many problems and challenges also with games and . How would you synchronise something at a large scale like the global state of the water?

I hope I gave you a little glance of what I think about all this!

@abde Thank you for your time. Overall, the reason I doubt we are in a "simulation" is because there are so many incredible (if completely useless from a practical perspective) complex, interconnected relationships... and what would be the point for a game?

I think has this to some extent... I've just not played with it recently. But of course, DF is on an entirely different level.

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