Really cool real-time fluids sim from Physics Forest you can check out now if you have the specs (GTX 1060 or above).
download page:
http://apagom.com/physicsforests/downloads/
Be sure to take the survey at the bottom of the downloads page, asking for which plugin you would like to see first.
What do you think? How close to seeing shipped titles with this tech are we?
With my company working on similar things, I feel like we’re still quite a ways off until something like this is usable in real-time in a game. I find this sort of innovation better for creating flip books and other traditional assets with much faster iterations. Their demo is quite nice, albeit a bit slow at times.
I think for quite some time it/simulations won’t be the defacto standard. For the simple reason that, it’s always more GPU budget on something that’s A) nice to have and B) can already be “done” but cheaper.
For as long as traditional methods exist and are quicker, there’s a hard case for real time simulations really.
There should be exceptions of course; physics-based games and similar genres will prob be the first to adopt this tech and games that can take more risks.
There’s a really interesting case with realtime simulations in games for gasses/liquids too - should they be two-way? Can these simulations ever affect gameplay entities? If so, then how do you control these simulations or the chaos, so the player is never left in a negative place?