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FLUIDNINJA Physics Plugin for Unreal Engine Looks Really Cool

Interfectum

Member
Not trying to be negative, i will believe if all these "tech showcase" implemented into actual video games.
Austin Powers Doctor Evil GIF
 

Zannegan

Member
The smoke demo looks really cool. Everything else is technically neat, I'm sure, but visually underwhelming. The snow is especially "meh" thanks to the fadt and fluid refill. I wonder if there's a way to stop that, or maybe just slow it down more.
 

Kupfer

Member
Tech is fine and all but now USE IT.
Last game I've played in which water effects really had an impact was From Dust, that was 10 years ago. Then, another 10 years ago, it was Blood Wake.
Devs have to figure out how to actually use water in an effective way. Just looking good and shiny isn't enough for me. TLOU2 water looks fucking awesome, but can I play around with it, fill buckets etc?
 

Ballthyrm

Member


This is the kind of thing I want to see in the games, rather than more push to the graphics department. I want the improvement in physics.


It's always shown in big empty place with nothing around and not a lot going on.
Why ?

Because it's a huge ressource hog, it takes forever so make something that look that nice and then it runs only when everything else is absent.
The cost benefit analysis is not worth it for most devs.

It all about where you choose to put your graphical budget and your programmer/artist time and effort.


Not happening. The new consoles aren't nearly powerful enough.
 
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Mr.ODST

Member
Yeah good luck getting all of that fully implemented into a game, while the tech showcases are cool 9/10 they vastly unoptimised or take too much system resource.
 

Notabueno

Banned
Most of it is unsuable for a full-scale game, as usual.

However Fluid Ninja allows you to script and export as animated decals some of these animation which, if there aren't too many of and they're optimised, are usuable.
 
Fuck yeah. I don't care for graphical advancements but the industry has actually regressed in terms of physics. It's sad to see modern games have zero physics in them, everything is pretty much flat and glued to the ground.
But if you take a look at some older games, max payne, fear etc, you'd see those games had solid physics in them.
 

Keihart

Member
Well, that explains the timestamp in the trailer since this is probably going to be the first UE5 game.




I wonder if it's using AI Physics simulations, it would make sense.

 
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Zannegan

Member
Unfortunately a lot of physics simulations are used just for show, and not for gameplay systems.

What Zelda did was awesome because it used physics as a way to provide interactions that most games don't nowadays
You can see in the video that it's all visual at this point (which, of course, because it's a tech demo). I just wonder how easy it would be to make those waves affect the character's movement or make the fire light, burn, and spread. Love the way the grass moves though.
 
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Holammer

Member
Not trying to be negative, i will believe if all these "tech showcase" implemented into actual video games.
Few games use the crazy physics they showed off with old Phys-X demos, or even ones shown after Nvidia bought them.
Like raytracing there's an uncomfortable computing cost associated with it.

 

Shifty

Member
Looks pretty, though UE has had simulation tech demos on this level for years in the form of Nvidia's GameWorks stuff, and nobody uses that either because it's designed for top-tier PC hardware instead of the lowest common denominator.

I had to spend weeks talking our lead artist down from Nvidia's customized engine ledge back when I was doing VR work. It's seriously compelling to look at, but good luck finding a customer base with those hardware requirements.

You can see in the video that it's all visual at this point (which, of course, because it's a tech demo). I just wonder how easy it would be to make those waves affect the character's movement or make the fire light, burn, and spread. Love the way the grass moves though.
Not impossible, but certainly difficult to do right.

These dense high-fidelity 3D simulations need to be computed wholly on the GPU to scale with interactive levels of performance, meaning their results are only available on the GPU unless you read them back into CPU land to affect gameplay objects.

That process tends to be performance-expensive, since it involves syncing up both units while memory is transferred. It can be accelerated with specially designed shared memory, or made asynchronous over a few frames like Metal Gear Rising's model cutting routine, but one way or other isn't a simple 'just works' affair.

It's probably more feasible to run a smaller-in-scope version of the same sim in directly in CPU land, since all that data would be available every frame with no fiddling.
Trouble there is that CPUs (the weak-ass console ones in particular) don't multithread nearly as well as GPUs, so you'd be trading off density or total size that way.
 
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Shifty

Member
Further to my point about it being more feasible to run these things in CPU land if you want them to affect gameplay, check this out:



Being a full voxel world rather than a special effects isosurface generated from a particle point cloud, it's not quite as visually impressive as the UE stuff in terms of sheer image quality.
However, since it's all done with a cutting-edge CPU algorithm, the entire sim can affect gameplay by default.

So in theory, you could take the sim data from this, then feed it into the GPU to generate pretty volumetrics via marching cubes, distance field raymarching, or various other techniques to get the best of both worlds.
The numbers would suggest being able to pull 120FPS on 4 cores, though unfortunately there's no mention of what kind of CPU it's running on.
 
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Further to my point about it being more feasible to run these things in CPU land if you want them to affect gameplay, check this out:



Being a full voxel world rather than a special effects isosurface generated from a particle point cloud, it's not quite as visually impressive as the UE stuff in terms of sheer image quality.
However, since it's all done with a cutting-edge CPU algorithm, the entire sim can affect gameplay by default.

So in theory, you could take the sim data from this, then feed it into the GPU to generate pretty volumetrics via marching cubes, distance field raymarching, or various other techniques to get the best of both worlds.
The numbers would suggest being able to pull 120FPS on 4 cores, though unfortunately there's no mention of what kind of CPU it's running on.


Flashback to 2009 when Carmack demoed a voxel-based id tech 6:

 

BARRAD

Neo Member
Make this demo 10x better by removing film grain\motion blur and stepping up res in console:

r.MotionBlur.Max 0
r.MotionBlurQuality 0
r.Tonemapper.Quality 0
r.setres 7680x4320f
 

Shifty

Member
Flashback to 2009 when Carmack demoed a voxel-based id tech 6:

I miss the Pre-Oculus era when Carmack would rock up with crazy new tech every few years. Megatextures may have been a miss, but those left-field innovations of his were always fascinating to see.

I remember Batman Arkham Asylum i think had smoke which reacted to the enviroment.
Yeah, that was very impressive at the time. If memory serves it was in specific areas like narrow inter-zone corridors where it could look good without tanking the framerate.
 
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kiphalfton

Member
Tech is fine and all but now USE IT.
Last game I've played in which water effects really had an impact was From Dust, that was 10 years ago. Then, another 10 years ago, it was Blood Wake.
Devs have to figure out how to actually use water in an effective way. Just looking good and shiny isn't enough for me. TLOU2 water looks fucking awesome, but can I play around with it, fill buckets etc?

Aww yes, the age old question "But can I play with it/them".

The answer...
You can look, but not glean any real enjoyment from it.
 
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CamHostage

Member
Ue5 games can't come soon enough.

So, yes to UE5, but just FYI, FluidNinja physics doesnt have much to do with UE5. It can be used in development of UE4 projects just the same.

UE5 is going to be great when projects built for its advancements start to finally ship, but we should be a little careful to think of it as the "savior of next-gen"; it's a tool for harnessing the full power of these machines (and other machines, existent and to come) and advancements in simulation systems, and there are lots of these tools in the works or being employed in upcoming software. UE5 is not the thing; it's the thing that helps us get to the thing.
 
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