The Buoyancy Problem in Video Games

[@stevenranck5478]

I wrote the boat physics for Hydro Thunder many years ago. I used a handful of points on the surface of the boat’s bounding box, measuring how far under the surface each point was and applied a proportional upward force at the points. I also used the velocity of each point toward or away from the surface to simulate drag/damping. After quite a bit of tweaking, everything worked well and was inexpensive enough for the hardware at the time.

[@juliencucco4030]

I wish your KZbin channel a happy first month ! 🎉 Hopefully we're gonna have a lot more awesome content ! 😁 I love your Unreal tutorials and that video is just awesome ! A lot more people are definitely gonna love it too as your video collection grows. 🥰 Keep up the good work ! 👍

[@BrandonCMaximum]

Really neat video. Things like this seem so simple on the surface, it's easy to take it for granted.

[@mariegrasmeier9499]

Great video. As a former teacher of marine hydrostatics, I totally love it! Spend a lot of time on that stuff in unity but finally ended up using the Dynamic Water Physics asset which does all the math for me. But still super interesting to see the theory behind it explained in such a great way. Good luck with your channel. Hope to see more soon

[@aghayejalebian7364]

Bro these videos are simply AMAZING

[@Brealmeidaa]

Great video! I never though that AAA games would neglect buorancy that much. Maybe is something that they just analised and wanst worth the effort? maybe from gameplay perspective it is not fun? no idea. But it is odd that they just ignore those physics laws and go straight to the "skyrim buoyancy" method.

[@Tetribution]

I think unless you're aiming for simulations, most of these things are not gonna add alot of value to gameplay - In a game like sea of thieves where you spend most of your time in water good buoyancy technology is a must, as it is where players will be spending their time. But in Skyrim water is more or less limited to small rivers and ponds.. So I think they simply decided to not focus a lot of effort on water physics that will be used very rarely and instead focused their resources on what players will be seeing/doing!

[@nekronavt]

I know it's a necropost but, Unreal Engine 5 actually has build in buoyancy system that comes with their water plugin.

[@robinj6997]

Could you explain a bit more about vertex buffer? If it is calculated on the GPU, how do we get the data back to the CPU to add forces? I'm a bit confused hehe, it's unknown territory for me. Most tutorials I've seen use a small number of specific measuring point (often only 3-6) to find the water height with gerstner or iFFT. Is it that your system can utilize more measuring points because the water is a cube (flatter)?

[@dylanberaza7944]

Could u Share the code ?

[@anophyte]

Great explanation and visualization, thanks for the vid!