Water physics

[pavelm 0]

Hi, will water physics be enabled again in the future? I love this game but I'm sad that the water won't fill a dug pit. It's a game with islands, water is an important part. 

[ocnoglittle 760]

In the first Q&A, Aleš said: Okay. This is a tough one. The reason why we pretty much disabled it, was because the fluid system wasn't programmed in a good way. This was part of a plug-in that we bought many years ago and we have never actually done anything to it. I think we improved it a little bit so it ran faster but it's still kind of demanding, performance-wise. And we keep optimizing the game. This is a tricky decision or tough decision to make because if we allow this... and it would be possible. The feature is actually still there. But if we allow this, then what could easily happen would be that someone would create a big hole with an explosion or do something with the terraformer. And by looking at the FPS (frames per second) at that moment, you would know that this is happening. The honest answer is, if we are to have the fluid simulation, we will need to rewrite it from scratch, the code. And it's not an easy thing. But I'm not sure if what we really need is this. The thing is, there is the fluid simulation and then there is the problem with, I don't know, just digging a bit of a beach and then the water stays in some unnatural shape. Maybe these specific situations could somehow be fixed, even without having a full-scale fluid simulation. And I'm not a programmer myself, or at least I'm not a programmer good enough to understand this fully or to tell you if this is possible and how difficult it is. But I can imagine that solving these situations would definitely be easier than creating the whole fluid simulation from scratch. And even if we pretty much reworked it and if we’ve done a complete overhaul, it would still take up some CPU performance, because these things are unfortunately costly. I will definitely take a look at those situations which bother you the most, and we will see if there's something that we can do about this. By the way, I think it's not really similar but this actually reminds me of some things that we've done with the terrain in 1.6. I don't know if I've mentioned it before in any Dev Diary. So I will just say here: when I think of this, I find this annoying. And also on a similar level of how things are annoying, I think I would have the fact that when you're in the Editor and you're trying to paint over the terrain, you would never be able to achieve the same look as if you generate the island yourself. You would always get this very obvious transition with sharp edges. This is something that we fixed in 1.6. So you are not getting a fluid simulation, but you are getting something else (enhanced terrain blending).

 

We don't know exactly when they will improve this because they don't want to over-promise.

[burbigo1 0]

Hey, thanks for the explanation.

Edited September 9, 2023 by burbigo1