Haubna

Liquid Physics V2 Progress

Added 2023-05-09 13:55:00 +0000 UTC

As I've mentioned before I am currently working on liquid physics V2. The goal is to get those high detailed fluid simulations like in the Minecraft animation videos. The old algorithm for it basically created a 3D model from spheres in the world which was very limitting. It stopped working at around 1.000 spheres. To achieve high resolution quality it must work with up to 100.000 spheres or more. With the new method that should easily work now BUT the compatibility with shaders is much harder which will require a lot of additional work as well. The last and final step is the physics simulation itself. PhysX 4.1 (the physics engine I use) didn't support a real fluid simulation which meant I had to use spheres and crudely approximate fluid behaviour. This also meant that it lagged a lot with 5.000+ spheres in the world. PhysX 5.1 recently got released and as some of you are aware the physics mod version for Minecraft 1.20 uses PhysX 5.1. This version supports real fluid dynamics although the Java wrapper for it isn't done yet which will also take some time.

The goal of the liquid physics is to replace the entirety of water in Minecraft (only client side and with the help of the ocean physics). So basically small sources of water will have extreme high quality simulations and big bodies of water will use the ocean physics. However as a starting point I would like to only have the liquid physics as a sort of cinematic feature since the implementation into the vanilla Minecraft gameplay will be very complex as well.

The video above demonstrates the amount of spheres being rendered (7k+) without any use of fancy shaders (for now).

As always thanks to everybody supporting the development of the Physics Mod! ❤️