Procedural Interactive Water in Memory- and Performance-Constrained Systems

Abstract

Particle effects are vital components of computer graphics in modern computer games. While game developers have a choice of several different methods for particle effects on PCs and home consoles, there exist only few solutions for games in the fast growing smartphones/tablets market. This is not only because of the more than a magnitude lesser computational performance of the systems-on-a-chip used there, but especially due to their even much slower memory access, which renders nearly all approaches used on standard PCs unsuitable for smartphones/tablets. To overcome the bottleneck of the memory access, I suggest using a procedural approach, which will be described fully in this paper, with the example of real-time water. It is based on particle movement in 2D, but by applying physical forces directly to the particles rather than using a pressure-field like in e.g. the popular Navier-Stokes based methods. This has the advantage of avoiding the need for two different data structures, one for the pressure-field and one for the particles themselves, and thus reduces memory usage significantly. In this paper I will also present a simple way to introduce interactions with the particle effect as well as a comparison with a low-complex Navier-Stokes based approach. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first scientific work investigating particle effects for systems-on-a-chip, like e.g. smartphones/tablets.