Yeah, i know what you're talking about. The IGUANA demo is great! (but they only obtain 3rd place in Assembly 94'
My work it's not a "super mega ultra water fluid simulation", it's just my 2 cents .
I only want to show something of my work to the forum and perhaps somebody thinks that is interesting.
Well, with a basic algorithm, we can obtain good results too. In most cases, a simple
elastic membrane model is often sufficient for games.
For example:
Code: Select all
Initialize u[i,j] (some function)
Initialize v[i,j]=0
loop
v[u.j] +=(u[i-1,j] + u[i+1,j] + u[i,j-1] + u[i,j+1])/4 – u[i,j]
v[i,j] *= 0.99
u[i,j] += v[i,j]
visualize (u)
endloop
This simple algorithm, model the water surface as an elastic membrane with low stiffness
(A. Jeffrey, Applied Partial Differential Equations, Academic Press, ISBN 0-12-382252-1)
The state of the art in off-line fluid simulation is impressive; (see Ron Fedkiw or some Nils Thurey works), but 10 minutes per frame (in average) is not suitable for realtime.

So, always the challenge is get as close as possible to off-line results with new or modified technics.
Today, procedural water (shaders, etc); particle systems and heightfields are used.
In particular, i develop a fluid solver on a scheme based in heightfield and LBM; (there are a lot of works based on NS equations, for example, but with LBM we model turbulence too).
The idea is extend this, using particles (splash, breaking waves, etc); implements some LOD, etc. and release a "stable" version.
Regards,