UPDATE: I've added a "hacker mode" for you all! You can now specify a userUpdate function and it will run it each frame. See my twitter post for a demo of it.
https://x.com/kotsoft/status/1806362956294189299
Thanks! With 3D the main challenge might be visualizing the layers separately. Ideally each of the phases would have some kind of metaball effect and also be transparent and even refract. Will be pretty tough to do and will have to fight with uncanny valley effect.
Sometimes for sandbox I feel like 2D can be more fun because people can target particles they interact with better.
Hi, I've updated the home page on my site (https://grantkot.com) with links to my other socials, like the YouTube and itchio pages. Twitter for more casual frequent updates, and YouTube for longer summary updates. The itchio demos need to be optimized for a wider variety of machines.
Yeah agree. The objective was more to make a physics toy that would run on single core on a phone than something for actual scientific or industrial use. I could add additional iterations or do pressure projection but then there would be complaints about it being slow & choppy.
There are also some large density ratios between the materials which further increased the difficulty, and would also increase the number of pressure projection iterations on a grid. I tried to simulate buoyancy without cheating (e.g. giving different materials different acceleration to gravity)
If you use WebGPU, for your acceleration structure, try to use the algorithm here presented in the Diligent Engine repo. This will allow you not to transfer data back and forth between CPU and GPU: https://github.com/DiligentGraphics/DiligentSamples/tree/mas...
Another reason I did it on CPU was because with WebGL you lack certain things like atomics and groupshared memory, which you now have with WGPU. For the Diligent Engine spatial hashing, atomics is required. I'm mainly using WebGL because of compatibility. iOS Safari still doesn't enable WGPU without special feature flags that user has to enable.
Thanks a lot, that is very interesting! I will check it out in detail.
But currently I will likely proceed with my approach where I do transfer data back and forth between CPU and GPU, so I can make use of the CPU to do all kinds of things. But my initial idea was also to keep it all on the GPU, I will see what works best.
And yes, I also would not recommend WebGPU currently for anything that needs to deploy soon to a wide audience. My project is intended as a long term experiment, so I can live with the limitations for now.
Yeah, pretty much this, I've experimented with putting on the GPU a bit but I would say particle based is 3x faster than a multithreaded & SIMD CPU implementation. Not 100x like you will see in Nvidia marketing materials, and on mobile, which this demo does run on, GPU often becomes weaker than CPU. Wasm SIMD only has 4 wide but the standard is 8 or 16 wide on most CPUs today.
But yeah, once you need to do graphics on top, that 3x pretty much goes away and is just additional frametime. I think they should work together. On my desktop stuff, I also have things like adaptive resolution and sparse grids to more fully take advantage of things that the CPU can do that are harder on GPU.
The Wasm demo is still in its early stages. The particles are just simple points. I could definitely use the GPU a bit more to do lighting and shading a smooth liquid surface.
Agree with most of the comment, just to point out (I could be misremembering) 4-wide SIMD ops that are close together often get pipelined "perfectly" onto the same vector unit that would be doing 8- or 16-wide SIMD, so the difference is often not as much as one would expect. (Still a speedup, though!)
You actually can adjust the settings for this. In settings>simulation, instead of sameRestDensity being 8 make it 0 and make it higher for diffRestDensity. I recommend doing it with low gravity as well (you can get zero g by clicking enable accelerometer on computers without accel)
Yes, the previous one is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40429878
There are some new features since then and some major speed improvements from using SIMD.
I do still see complaints about the compressibility so I still need to work on some improvements for that.
(dev)
