Since my last dev log, I made a pretty big change by making the fluid interact with actual 3D objects instead of just the bounds.
First, I cleaned some stuff up like spawning the particles in a neat cube among other little stuff. Then I decided to refactor how stuff was being rendered. Before, I had two separate canvases, one WebGL canvas for the scene and one WebGPU canvas for the particles, because I was lazy implementing them and so I merged them into one since. That didn’t make too big of a difference visually but it makes it easier to add other stuff later.
The main feature was getting the fluid to actually flow around objects. The particles can now collide with not only boxes and spheres but any complex shape I place in the scene. The torus knot is the only complex shape set up so far, but the same system will work for pretty much anything I add later.
The other half was making the objects feel realistic. Like at first, they were just static test objects and the fluid could only move around them but not push them so they could move. I added proper physics to the objects so they float and move around realistically in the water and pretty much react to it. Getting this to work took quite a while like objects would spin violently when in contact with the water or bobbing up and down non stop but I eventually got it to work.
Next up is pretty much the biggest change yet (at least visually). I want to remove the container and add real terrain over which the fluid can realistically flow over and stuff. Most of the foundation for this change is pretty much setup and the biggest change is to actually generate the terrain. After that I want to improve the physics of the objects. Right now the physics are like deliberately really simple like objects collide with the container only and can’t interact with other objects and the rotations aren’t even handled well. Once there is a terrain, then I’ll work on them pretty much.