My .02: I’m trying to put together a simulation for ocean, and the Water plugin, so far, ain’t cuttin’ it. The Fluid Flux plugin looks great, but they’re limited to a 1024x1024 static mesh that gets displaced by fluid height. From the author of the Flux plugin:
“The geometry of fluid is rendered using a static mesh plane displaced by fluid height. The system uses a huge plane (1024×1024) for rendering the water surface without any dynamic tessellation. This method has a lot of quality flaws. Try to avoid using huge simulation resolution because you will run out of memory very fast, 1024×1024 seems like a good compromise for now.”
Which leads me to wonder if Tessellation would really improve the situation: would dynamic tessellation not take up extra memory? If so, that’s an iron-clad reason for keeping it in the framework.
Maybe they have something amazing in store for oceans, including storms, large wave geometries, foam, wind interaction, etc. But, if you try to do too much, you’re taking the agency from the developers and enforcing a singular aesthetic to the work. Realism is certainly a good standard, but what if that’s not the vision of the developer?
I think the answer is to give the developers all the tools they need to create expansive games / experiences, provide as much heavy lifting as you can (as Unreal), and let the developers take what they want to build upon.