Fluid Mechanics in Game Programming

That's a nicely written, approachable article for those of us who have forgotten much of our university studies.

I should add that anyone wanting to put fluid dynamics into their program might also wish to google about for papers on opengl and GPUs performing the calculations.

To see a game that makes an interesting use of fluid dynamics you could look at pop-pop from Ambrosia Software. Completely ungamerelated, but the background of the playing field appears to be a fluid simulation reacting to the play elements. It is beautiful and slightly hypnotic. (Game was built in a day of slower CPUs. The blockiness of the simulation reflects this.)

In a previous life I spent a lot of time writing and working with software to solve partial differential equations to describe various types of fluid flow. It's a big and complex subject: very roughly speaking the accuracy of the simulation tends to be proportional to the amount of computer power and time spent on it.

A really interesting question in the context of fluid dynamics for games is what is the simplest thing you can do which makes the movement of a fluid look realistic, without worrying about all the details of mass conservation, numerical diffusion etc etc that cause the computational fluid dynamicists to pull their hair out.

If you're implementing fluid dynamics in a piece of software you're selling for money, you owe it to yourself to install BioShock. It has awesome water in it - you stop and go, "wow, that looks like real water."