I started playing around with the shallow water equations and got to something that's maybe a little bit fun. Arrow keys make waves, Z switches boundaries between (approximately) open and reflecting. My implementation mostly follows https://graphics.ethz.ch/Downloads/Publications/Tutorials/2008/Mue08/coursenotes.pdf .
Current limitations/known bugs:
- Dissipates energy rapidly, although you'll probably only notice this if the boundaries are reflective.
- No handling of dry regions. Weird things may happen if depth goes to 0!
- Weird oscillations around both (nearly-)dry regions and shocks/big elevation changes. Not sure yet how much of this is attributable to bugs vs. limitations of the discretization I'm using.
- Liquid volume is not conserved. Not really a meaningful concept with open boundaries, but pretty noticeable with reflective boundaries.
- No wave breaking etc. Shallow water equations are a heightfield model and I don't think I'll get around to full liquids on PICO-8 any time soon. :)
I hope this cart is fun to play with! I'm hoping to fix a few of the items above, clean up the graphics a bit, and maybe find a way to build a little bit of a game around these dynamics.
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Started playing around with 2D sims - fluids seem hard to do at reasonable resolution given CPU constraints, but waves are just fine. More natural boat control and bilinear interpolation for wave rendering (more detail! less blocky!) both might make this more fun.
I'm also wondering if there's a racing game here where you can interact with the waves and they aren't just part of the scenery.
A little cloud-based audio toy. Move your cloud around for different sounds. Would love to know what might make it more fun!
This is a little fire experiment I've started playing with. It uses basically the same lookup table setup as https://hackernoon.com/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line-8ea15d21fed7 , although that may not have turned out to be absolutely neccessary.
What I'm happy with:
- controls
- performance
- overall look
What could use work:
- sound could respond to player actions
- smoke could drift a little more interestingly
What might be fun to add:
- setting other things on fire
- scorch marks or some other permanent trace
Thoughts are more than welcome!
