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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

it blows my mind that cfd is a thing we can do in real time on a pc

Yes, we can since a long time. They were already a thing 14 years ago on the PS3 in the game "Pixeljunk shooter" [0].

But real time simulations often use massive simplifications. They aim to look real, not to match exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQkvlxLV6sI

Heck, the Wii had Fluidity around the same time period (2010), and that's a lot weaker than the PS3. Fluidity was pretty neat—you played as a volume of water, changing states as you moved through a level that looked like a classic science textbook:https://youtu.be/j7IooyXp3Pc?si=E79rCrq2mdyZSKoF&t=120

Well, technically yes.

Both use the same technique: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics.

But the PS3 was able to fill the whole screen with these particles. Hundreds of them. The game Fluidity seems to have approx. 20.

> The game Fluidity seems to have approx. 20.

It had more than 20, but... not by much.

thanks, i had no idea about pixeljunk shooter! it looks like those fluids are 2-d tho. otoh it's apparently performing a multiphysics simulation including thermodynamics

btw, almost unrelatedly, you have no idea how much i appreciate your exegesis of the voxelspace algorithm

I remember reading about finite element tire models and how complicated they were, they can now run in real time give or take a bit.

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