How realistic would people be expecting the water to be? Personally I'd be happy if it slowed down objects, created splashes when people shot/crashed into it, and flowed if a hole was created underneath it.

Is full displacement really necessary? It's not like you can push piles of dirt around in this game. If we're not going overboard on dirt physics, I see no reason to do so with water physics as well.

Burning Sand is one of the slowest implementations of flowing water I've seen, btw.

Burning Sand can get 10,000 fps, but, hey.

Also, water has to be more physics enabled because it's expected to be. You wouldn't expect to push a pile of dirt by running into it, would you? But, a big stream of water, definitely.

i think in CC true water is not achievable. Its just not gonna happen.

But, one way to implement it would be, instead of calculating every pixel of water, have the program just calculate the top layer of water. It would be more like spring physics, as it would be similar to calculating the oscillations of a rubber band, or a spring or something. This would achieve a feel similar to surface tension as it already is. Then the area below this top surface would just be filled in with blue, until it hit another solid. Gravity could be reduced by a factor in this area, giving the feel of buoyancy.

^
So pools of water would just be a big blob? Hm..

There could be some problems but.. It would solve alot of them too.

Its quite expandable, and it greatly reduces the need for thousands of calculations, and there would be virtually no lag.

Also it can handle splashes by having a limit on how strong the bonds between the top particles are (eg surface tension) and when it exceeds this limit it breaks and bits spash out. They now create a ring of top layer around them, so it acts like a lifelike droplet.

Is there anything i have missed?

How would that system calculate people tunneling underneath the river/lake?

Hmmm..What if we had water like, solid to start. But when touched, it because "Water", so water won't exist until it has too, and have it always go down or something, solving the tunnel.

Grif

if an empty space appeared below the body of water, a new surface layer would be formed. however due to the weight of the water, it would break, and the filled area would flood into the empty space, fill the container its in, and a new surface layer would be formed.

If the GPU is used to handle physics as well then that should boost performance, because in CC currently only the CPU for everything.

yeah... cant wait for that...

Is there any way to force the programs calculations onto the GPU?

probably, you should ask data about that.

Just to point out, at one point during build 14 I had flowing water, don't remember exactly how I did it, as my computer got virus'd before I was able to upload it or create backups, but yes, it's possible to do flowing water as a MATERIAL, I had it pooling and displacing, not 100% mind you, but yes, it is possible.

try to do that again, it could be a CC milestone

Sometimes it pooled, but other times it shattered the terrain like super acid, so I was never sure if it was stable enough for a release...:/

well if it did that then it just means it was "stronger" than, say, sand and the lighest layer of dirt. but if you did the water and it poured into the darkers layer of dirt, then it might stay.