Voxel Water Physics - Waterfalls, Rivers and Tunnels

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It took a bit longer than expected, but the fluid simulation design from a few months ago has been implemented in our voxel project. It uses the same cell/particle hybrid method and is therefore fully volumetric with no height range limit beyond the 0-4095 y world boundary! It will flow through buildings, fall down into caves, flow over and under cliffs, fill up containers and lakebeds, and navigate through tunnels. The design has been adapted to run sparsely and inline with the world generation. The entire pipeline has also had its design improved to be 99% multithreaded, with a 1% critical section that has the smallest execution time. In this video, 4 CPU threads were used and the simulation time never exceeded 8ms.
Saving to/loading from disk, generating it naturally, spawning and controlling it, and not pouring into unloaded areas are implemented. Currently it only interacts with terrain and buildings as seen in the video, but player and object interactions will come soon. Some improvements to be made include the sound calculations, rendering and supplemental particles.
The video used faucets for the waterfalls that will run indefinitely (and eventually fill up the whole world), because there's no evaporative water cycle. With water being finite, waterfalls spawning from a body of water will eventually run out. I still don't have a good idea to solve this, but I'm definitely open to any ideas.
As always, thanks for all your support and patience! ☀️❤️

[@HillcrestGames]

This is one of the most promising prototypes I've ever seen period.

[@EliezeruDanieru]

Is this from the game : minecraft?

[@dark_hood7]

@@EliezeruDanieru no but youtube thinks that apparently

[@EliezeruDanieru]

@@dark_hood7 May I know what game this is? 🙏

[@dark_hood7]

@@EliezeruDanieru it's a sandbox game similar in a way to Minecraft but with good physics made by John Lin, you can see the progress on his channel

[@tehMaloWalo]

have fun playing in 240p

[@Frostyflytrap]

Wow, this is the closest we have so a 3D Noita now. Love seeing how well the fluid looks, I would recommend making the sprays more transparent over time so it isn't so noisy, but otherwise really awesome and I'm surprised this performs well. I would love to see this in conjunction with a waterwheel object.

[@clemdemort9613]

Oh fuck yeah let's call this 3d noita

[@Razumen]

Nah the particles look fine, they only appear on turbulent water normally anyways.

[@Razumen]

@Ceono Yah

[@WeiChei]

You should try a game called "Teardown" on steam, if you want 3d Noita, Teardown has fully destructible voxel environments.

[@delphicdescant]

@@WeiChei I think it's safe to bet that anyone who knows about this project already knows about teardown. And probably about every other ambitions voxel project in the voxel game dev community that's currently being publicized.

[@osiris4457]

I've been asking about water physics for a few months. Didn't expected it to be this amazing. Beautiful job!

[@WretchedEgg528]

Amazing? It's groundbreaking!

[@EliezeruDanieru]

@@WretchedEgg528 It's waterbreaking!

[@ThatCake]

@@EliezeruDanieru With erosion i could see it breaking some ground too

[@barnabaskrizsan9943]

I want to play this as a full RPG game. It has a vibe that i never seen before, but the same time it brings back old Gameboy Zelda vibes. Its fantastic.

[@absalondebarvac3715]

We will all hope it eventually happens

[@MrPeryfin]

I would settle for anything done with this :D Tbh it has a charm to me because of the infinite world and I'm not sure it could work for an rpg?

[@mattsenne6951]

I would really prefer this sandbox be available without the extra baggage of gameplay rules. Looks incredible.

[@absalondebarvac3715]

@@mattsenne6951 maybe just make it an open source engine or something so people can make different stuff with it

[@runkgames6251]

golden light on steam looks like this. its a horror rogue like and it is something else...

[@___bas]

One tip about the audio: it seems that when an audio source is to the right, 0% of the audio reaches the left ear, in the real world something is never 100% to the right. It's a bit jarring on headphones rn

[@BoofPack69]

Yeah agreed

[@zestyorangez]

@Maximus Lockhart That would be great but i imagine it would tank performance.

[@cupidknewrap]

@@zestyorangez HRTF sound is pretty lightweight these days pretty much all VR apps are using it even on mobile level hardware.

[@idontfeelsogood2063]

Maybe something like AMD TrueAudio would be good? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_TrueAudio PS5 (CPU and GPU is AMD based) is using it or something similar (google PS5 3D Audio) When we are going into full physics simulation (every voxel is an interactable object and has it's own properties + Ray Tracing) physics based audio would be a good idea I think.

[@shreyanshdarshan3199]

unbelievable performance

[@PoppinDan]

I see so much potential my dude, i know everyone here in your comments has already said that but truly, this a gem in the making, can’t wait to see this one day explode in popularity

[@gawni1612]

Oh My God! John Lin. You realize you're sitting on a GAMING GOLDEN EGG. I've never been this excited. This is going to change the landscape (pun intended) of gaming and real-time simulation FOREVER. I'm beside myself. This is more promising than DMM back in the day, than Euclideon's promises before they shifted gears...just ...dude... take all my money.

[@isaacsrandomvideos667]

I just hope he doesn’t sell it to Microsoft

[@makelgrax]

Yeah, I can see this really picking up pace if he were to make the engine open source, but I'm guessing he won't

[@QuentinDamour]

Looks magical ! The particle effect is a bit over the top in my opinion, a bit messy. It's great to see the project evolve so fast, thank you for your dedication

[@freevideoservice]

That messiness is real magic

[@maxwell_edison]

I mean, it is fairly unusual to literallly spawn water in mid air and have it fall. You can see in actual typical use cases the water is fine

[@jiinkC]

In the description he says that he plans on improving the sound calculations, rendering, and supplemental particles.

[@5ld734]

Tbh it probably hides any ugliness of the water

[@TheLaughingPuddles]

To solve the infinite water issue, your dirt / ground cover could gradually delete water over time kind of like water naturally draining into aquifers IRL. if the plater wants to stop this process they could use a faucet and or some kind of hard stone to catch the water. Do you have plans for different Biomes? I think a desert would be very cool

[@ChezzyKnytt]

This + Teardown makes me think we're in for a voxel revolution.

[@Drstrange3000]

I wish! I love the implementation of physics in these games.

[@SagaEf]

this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life

[@Rychlas]

There are a few ways you could solve this. In a fully realistic way (water evaporation, drainage by seeping through the soil, then reintroducing the water with rain and water sprouts. The easier, more interesting, colorful and useful to players way would be adding a fantasy-like sources and drains of water. Worldgen would create both sources of infinite water and drains in forms of elemental fluctuations/cores/manifestations/fissures of sorts or however you'd like to call them. Players could also craft their own. Some fissures could be magically linked to eachother and whatever falls into the water drainage would get spewed out of the linked source. This would allow Players to make and design their own flowing rivers and waterfalls. Some specific creatures could spawn near each fissure. Just an idea tho.

[@kakaodieb]

Just remembered this dude and his project. Aaaaand he's gone

[@Twinkles__]

actually he posted something on his blog recently although i dont think it has much to do with the engine, its ai stuff :/

[@vyvisabastard]

i could spend literal hours just exploring this game

[@mrfantasticxx]

Why can I imagine people making huge dams in river valleys and creating a crack and watching the place flood.

[@smaakjeks]

Because that's what we all want to do

[@isaacsrandomvideos667]

@@smaakjeks yes

[@NothingBootz]

Maybe add a evaporation rate to water, so a small percentage dissapears over time, and this substracted evaporation total is added to the ammoun of water poured down when rain comes.

[@Jerberjer]

For the time being, a drain object can suffice, ore a pump object that transfers the water to a new location

[@Filipolis]

Maybe one object that absorbs a certain amount of water and another one that releases the same amount? Both would be unrelated but you could connect them with something that looks like a pipe to make it appear realistic :D

[@levilukeskytrekker]

You know, this is a good idea, actually. Naturally generated bodies of water could have drains in them, or heck, certain types of stone could even just slowly drain water out of the world, to counteract the constant input.

[@smaakjeks]

Yeah, set the drain object to whatever elevation you want the water table to be at

[@darenoon]

I know it'd been two years...but...man I need a Voxel sandbox/survival game in my life right now...re-watching this video got me excited for gaming again 😔😔😔

[@ItsSardine]

Stormworks should’ve been made like this. The flooding physics would’ve been crazy

[@froggy3875]

I always wanted water physics. And now we have it!

[@stablemind]

Ultra detailed voxel world. Nice ecosystem and physics simulation.

[@RagdollRocket]

the one and only channel where I click the bell icon, ever.

[@jajajatr]

Boy you better get hands on with topping minecraft, the engine has the full potential, its so beautiful

[@voidedgolem4906]

This is so unbelievably impressive. My god, what have you done?

[@volchonokilliR]

Extraordinary. It's like seeing a dream in reality

[@nikkonikko371]

Woah, you finally combined the water sim with this! Again, spectacular! I am very excited. Edit: i think there should be some kind of black hole material that sucks the water to prevent overflowing.

[@MERALLAK]

Man lots of memories with voxels. I love this!

[@schniemand]

As others say, evaporation could be one thing. However, I can also imagine that the water could flow downwards and maybe even seep through materials. As it gets lower and lower, it evaporates more and more (or maybe not...) and eventually it "flows out of the world" if it doesn't end up evaporating. Making the "faucets" the sky by introducing rain somehow would also be really cool. A rain faucet positioned above the player and additional rain faucets positioned above big, open bodies of water, if the game can detect where those are. Maybe with drop size larger than 1 voxel, to make it splashier and somewhat unique. The game could maybe keep track of how much water leaves the area through either evaporation or seeping out and reintroduce that amount as rain, perhaps with offsets depending on the current area and the current season. Might be somewhat wild ideas, perhaps too difficult to implement, but I've also seen that you can already implement crazy stuff and thought I'd share my thoughts about this.

[@kech-agmaio8620]

This makes me want to cry, it's so beautiful

[@Thornskade]

This gives me a strange kind of nostalgia. It's the kind of world manipulation I've dreamt of as a kid I think around the time I played Worms 3D, and now I'm seeing it for real

[@happymelonboy3792]

Ok, recently after every video that you post you leave me stunned :D I've been waiting to see water physics applied in your project after those simulations you posted and oh boy this is a real killer! Keep up the good work and stay amazing :3 Edit: I love this really noticable sound placement (for the lack of knowledge about better term to describe it xd)

[@SimoneBattaglia94]

I can totally imagine something like talking with animals and plants about abstract and dreamy stuff things in this world. Beautiful.

[@codemancz798]

Amazed at how well this runs. I wonder how oceans are going to be handled.

[@pizzahutjr7925]

BOATS

[@kpdelaney6460]

The sound design is so good too! I am so excited to see this game develop.

[@jasonrubik]

Totally amazing ! So much potential here ! Will there be gas fluid as well ? Will a furnace need the proper amount of airflow in order to stay hot enough ? Will individual voxel elements have physical and/or chemical properties to allow them to interact ? Please consider adding that feature ! Also, as I said on twitter, where the heck is the Patreon or Kickstarter page !? :)

[@FisTheEvil]

genuinely the most beautiful game ive ever seen

[@darxoonwasser]

How can a game be so detailed while also being beautiful and performant??? I'm impressed

[@jsierra88]

Holy cow! Those physics are outstanding!

[@categorille8330]

damn this is... very cool. Sounds nitpicky but i would argue the stereo 3d sound is a bit over-the-top, like you should still hear the waterfall from the opposite ear, else it kinda hurts my head (personally)

[@ganghorsemen4146]

absolutly wild that this is done with voxels

[@Magnymbus]

This reminds me of when I did stuff like this irl as a kid. I would take a huge mound of mud and sand that was piled up near my grandparents house and claw out miniature tunnels, ravines and roads and then put a hose in it to make a mountain scene for my hot wheels. I couldn't run the hose for too long so I tried to make the path as meandering and slow as possible. It was great... Until a some wasps decided that my tunnels were a great place to set up their nest. 😕

[@Tibi93]

There are a couple of ways I can see to deal with the water faucets filling the world problem. Bodies of water exposed to open air or soft ground can "evaporate" or "absorbed". When a water faucet spawns water it removes at random some water from one of those bodies of water that are tagged as "can evaporate" or "can be absorbed". So ideally water that user isolated wont be affected and natural flowing water will always be in a state of balance. There can also be a maximum water budget per zone/map, and the evaporation system only kicks in then. Holes or special drain blocks in the bedrock of the map can also act as drains.

[@PolarbearYGT]

Legit. This is so good that with each video my heart beats faster. I think to myself oh maybe he's done that like this, etc but another video comes in and I'm baffled yet again. Mind blowing stuff

[@chinois11]

this guy is an artist, i can't even imagine creating a tree asset looking this good, and he made a whole world

[@prltqdf9]

Simply marvellous stuff.

[@numero7mojeangering]

KZbin says it's Minecraft but I don't see the correlation your work is much more advanced than that cubic game! Love your work, hope for the best! ♥️👍😍😁

[@ian_b]

I find this very inspiring and exciting to look at, like when polygonal 3D first became available and one could only imagine what would be possible in the future with it.

[@jacobmaz8157]

Can’t wait to see this withought KZbin compression, and it already looks so good

[@offworldangel]

The starry sky makes it awesome like a dream

[@eraea9179]

Recently found this, and I am really amazed by your work! I think having evaporation cycles for water to turn to clouds then for clouds to turn to rain is a neat concept, but doing so would have you do alot of sub systems to implement such as temperature, maybe particle to particle interaction, and a weather system.

[@cayennemist]

Where did this go? This is 3 years old. The potential for survival builder games to have flowing water is insane. Valheim, Enshrouded, Dune, Conan.... imagine water wheels, aqueducts, water falls. At this point Id take minecraft water over set water hights.

[@tjiiik]

Man, you just keep ballin' do ya? Great stuff man.

[@zaikkoz]

This is the most beautiful game ive ever seen

[@wrOngplan3t]

Mind.blown! Maybe not directly comparable, but this is the best water physics I've seen since Hydrophobia: Prophecy (2011), or that river in Outcast (1999 game, a favourite of mine). Amazing work!

[@is0295]

How do you even optimize something like this, this is amazing.

[@prltqdf9]

1:12 It looks as if the water is made out of polygons, which it probably is.

[@Luka1180]

Now we need said voxel fluids system to be able to affect the player with its physics too. And add ragdoll player physics into the mix and you got yourself somethign special.

[@nonamenoname1942]

Looks amazingly beautiful. It's "the next Minecraft" for sure!

[@skop6321]

WHAT HOW No seriously though. This is the coolest voxel video game I've seen since Minecraft. You have real-time raytracing and dynamic fluid systems. And those work together! The art style alone is amazing but buildable voxels plus dynamic fluids? I am buying this yesterday. Legit reminds me of what I would make as a game. for a name how about JL SandBox or pxl-planet or . . . names are hard.

[@atchisaldoasangma6934]

Finally not a Blender Output video. here we go

[@lilwashu]

i would love to see more bioms, maybe open rolling plains, or ocean cliffs with fog? but still very beautiful! would love to play this one day, it reminds me a ton of those sandbox games back from like 2012 that were everywhere where you had like 30 elements you could play with also what would be cool is if you could have a shooting stars and on occassion one would slam into the earth creating a crater or something... iuhuh... shooting out ideas

[@roach888i]

This is extremely good, hard to find something like this elsewhere

[@alectriciti]

Oh my god this is beautiful.

[@DynoX-7]

Very nice! been seeing this from occasional retweets on twitter and so its crazy to see it come along!

[@alexwharton4376]

You did amazing on the physics

[@DerpedCrusader]

This is draw droppingly beautiful! I can't believe what I'm seeing. Holly crap

[@thomashall2749]

So cool, and beautiful too! I hope equally fun gameplay can go on top of all this.

[@Jabberwalks]

I can't wait to get thrown into a game in this world. Also that water makes me go sploosh.

[@The5lacker]

As far as removing water goes, two things I definitely think should be considered: 1. Any water surface that's ultimately connected to the Sky should evaporate slowly, functionally disappearing. Capping off the surface completely should stop that process. 2. Any water that's in contact with certain materials should diffuse into it slowly, functionally disappearing. Putting the water in non-porous surfaces like stone or bricks should stop that process. That way water could be contained by artificial structures, but any natural water sources should disappear or reach some sort of equilibrium eventually. Granted, I have no idea HOW to do either of those, and most of my initial thoughts would probably be woefully inefficient, but I definitely think something along those lines should be the goal.

[@Silails]

Gorgeous, the sun light going through the water and doing that beautiful caustics in it, 😗👌

[@DTLions26]

Everyone dosent even know that a game with actual fluid physics is already out. It’s called paper beast. It has sand and flowing water physics. It’s a criminally underrated game, check it out.

[@seed2338]

holy this looks so incredible

[@mordor666]

Wow rarely seen such awesome water physics. Especially in a game. Can't wait to play around with it. :) Greetings from Germany

[@johnromine6914]

This would be so cool as a game, cool video.

[@morte1176]

this is awesome, i really am loving this project and loocking up to know more; does the project have a name yet? ( ps: the video compression is pretty bad tho)

[@gamerhen777]

He should just call it John Lin's Sandbox or something

[@АлександрХаустов-й6с]

I am impressed. This is really unique project

[@johnpayne791]

The thing with waterfalls is that they're simply just a river that dropped in elevation, so a fluid simulation wouldn't exactly suffice to create a continuous waterfall. What you'd need is a separate river simulation that has a continuous flow to it even if the river is finite.

[@JustStart562]

Man this would be a legendary survival game it would go down in history

[@dnt_alert5806]

True dat

[@harlow1719]

looks awesome cant wait to see more!

[@TheBezio22]

Can't wait to see more, it looks stuning already!

[@leofreitasa9933]

this is the craziest thing I've ever seen

[@TheAgkangas]

Very nice. I am hoping to see this get more views.

[@NSXtacy-]

This looks like you took the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come, when he's in the painting, and made a game out of it. Amazing.

[@Error-mn4el]

this looks incredible, just WOW

[@ShockedBones]

This is gorgeous

[@mfiorentino]

Gotta pick my jaw up from the floor. Amazing job!

[@schmaul2644]

I really love you stuff, but the spray/foam is a little too noisy on the eyes.

[@lucidvalidity7056]

This is so stunning and gorgeous the sound and look is so amazing and hud and gameplay flow so nicely every frame is a literal artwork o love and how the best for this project

[@sleepykittyMMD]

this is amazing, i didnt even know it was possible to do this with voxels. id love to learn how to do something like this, but i'm probly a long ways from understand how to craft or understand something that beautiful.

[@jessemccarthy1893]

This is unbelievably good work!

[@eboatwright_]

I love this :) It's so amazing! Also, I love how the youtube description says this is Minecraft XD

[@kanikabhatia9865]

Is this Vulkan ? Also, how is the performance of this ? Also, awesome graphics, math, physics, audio etc just keep it up. There are not enough words to describe the awesomeness of this.

[@Ceeed100]

Oh man, real time water physics. AWESOME :D

[@Lukegear]

This is beyond incredible! Btw, I clicked so absurdly fast when I saw the title lol I have a ton of questions now, I'm eagerly awaiting a video where you may go into more details about the whole project :)

[@deliciousnoodles5505]

Fluid simulation is damn expensive to run, and as you mentioned you use the hybrid particle/cell method. I wonder how you parallelize the pressure solve calculations.

[@biggusmunkusthegreat]

Without knowing how your ECS is working, if you have a 3D grid for the voxels that is fixed, use a random sampling of the world with a set number of iterations that finds water with air on top or water with an absorbing material (like dirt) below it and removes the water. The random samples can be guided or not, up to you (e.g. checking near faucets or affectors, etc.). This can be done on its own thread, passively, and you can even time slice it based on the amount of water over a threshold to allot more time to the sampling algorithm (e.g. base_iteration_count * (total_water / ideal_max_water)). The other way you can do this is to use an old trick where water condenses over time. No, this isn't realistic, but it simulates evaporation in the general case. You have a small chance - the evaporation rate - during a fluid particle collision of removing one of the particles. The chance must be very small. Unless you want realistic water physics in that water contained in an air-tight space does not evaporate, but you're encroaching on areas of CS that become Hard ("hard" here in the complexity sense). The biggest problem, especially since you hinted at finite water (not sure if you mean _literally_ finite, as though you have fixed buffers or something) is evaporating at a rate that is equal to or greater than the emission rate, of course. One other alternative (we were implementing a game like this at some point but it's kind of been lost to the sands of time, sadly) is to make the world floating. It changes the "lore" but gives you a story-telling advantage that water falls off the edge of the world down to... whatever is below. Set a character Kill-Z and a water kill-Z and that's how you can ultimately despawn water particles without breaking the illusion. Oh how I wish our engine looked anything like yours. Your vision here is exactly what was in our heads :/ It's almost painful to see. You did it so much better. I've watched this almost a hundred times now. Working so long on stories and music and audio and art and having it kind of fizzle out, and then seeing something like this... I'm just really impressed.

[@etch-6261]

this game looks awesome i'd really love to wishlist it on steam and then buy it

[@NovaFive]

Just discovered your project, and it is sooooo cool!! But...the stereo panning...There's always some reflections on the opposite ear in real life, if you can fix that, you'll create a really pleasant stereo ambient!

[@yazaaan]

DUDE! That's amazing! This realy has potential