Minecraft-esque water physics!

@Albert’s water system (the current implementation) is vastly superior to Minecraft’s. You have limited water, yet are able to have channels and waterfalls that act properly.

The main issue is that, although the system is dynamic and works pretty well, water is considered “static”, e.g. the world generation does not really implement anything but lakes. It’s possible to dig channels and waterfalls, but the end result will be lakes again. Unless, as mentioned, it’s over-filling, in which case the water just goes everywhere. Because water doesn’t seep into the ground or evaporate, it’ll just be a really thin layer over a lot of area - like if the whole world was made out of plastic or similar.

It’s technically possible to have pumps or similar already; I’ve thought about adding some for Zulser but never came around it. With a pump, you could have waterfalls that run 24/7 or similar. Maybe I pick that up again for something at some point. Having a way to move water around, or water spawns and seepage/evaporation would make water a lot more useful. But that’s an issue not in the water, but rather world generation.

… personally, I couldn’t come up with a proper way to add sinks/drains into the auto-generated world either.

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I personally would like to see the Engineer be able to make a type of pipe that pulls water from one area into another. The only issue with this is how you would hide it underground so you dont have pipes everywhere. This would allow people to make self sustaining waterfalls and the like without worry of water ruining everything

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why do we need “object” pipes? just use voxel channels? it is a voxel game after all :wink:
pumps can simply work on voxel level as well. Though not quite the same, Dwarf Fortress may be a good reference (the “voxel space” is different though). Stonehearth should be capable of nicer “piping channels” due to the finer voxel space.

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This was basically what I was thinking would work best in my massive wall of text – I don’t actually want finite and infinite water, I’ve explored the limits of that in Towns and found it rather less than ideal (nothing worse than having the water evaportate at both the “start” and “end” of a channel, so you accidentally get rid of a whole lake while trying to move a little of it around).

The way I see it, simply having one item to spawn water and one to get rid of it would be enough for now. Later on, Radiant can work on the more advanced engine tech required for proper pumping and so on. It would be amazing if, later down the line, we can get “item dependency” – items which only work if another item is nearby. The potential with a system like that is utterly massive… it allows for mechanisms, magical conduits, even basic logic gate construction. However, all of that requires engine content; whereas spawning and removing water are already in the engine.

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Pumps/drains are also used in “clonk” a good. But not realistic way to reproduce waterfalls

I still hope that there will be some more usefulness to water, besides aesthetics. For example, water could cause a bonus on the grow rate of crops, if the farm plot is placed near water (think about irrigation system). Some crops could explicitly require access to water to grow at all (e.g. rice). Water could also be used in certain cooking recipes or potions. And fishing… but there are enough topics about that already.

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I’m definitely keen to get those kind of functions later. As you say, there are plenty of threads on that subject… and I’ve basically contributed to/agreed with all the ones which have come up since I got here, lol!

However, the fluid physics and the water’s in-game functions should, IMO, be separate issues. Obviously the two are related and can’t ever be fully separated; however it’s a different matter to implement the water “functions” vs the water “mechanics”.

If the mechanics are deep enough (e.g. pressures, flow, carrying items along with the flow, temperature, freezing/forming ice, swiming and drowning, and so on), then players can get started doing all kinds of cool things even without any “functions” in place. It also means that, once the functions like crop growth are added, players will already have knowledge to share about good ways to manipulate water and get it where you want it.

I guess what I’m saying here is that while I want all the cool things to do with water, there’s a matter of priority. And my vote goes to mechanics first, functions/features second; purely because I can create my own functions when the mechanics are in place. And, looking at priority in the wider sense (priority of the whole game’s development, not just water), I figure it makes sense to put the water mechanics relatively high on the to-do list since that would mean the water mechanics are in place and stable at roughly the same time as the terrain building/moving mechanics. Together, those two systems allow players all kinds of freedom to build amazing structures, while giving Radiant time to look back through what will then be the newly-added features and monitor anything about them which isn’t working properly.

From there, they can move into other features, confident that the base game world is “solid” and won’t break no matter how players manipulate it. That gives Radiant the possibility to work on things like dungeons, new enemy camps, even new enemy types (which may do interesting things when faced with impassable terrain, e.g. flying or swimming); all with the knowledge that the terrain systems won’t be changing in the future. After all, there’s nothing worse than having one cool new feature break a feature which has been “finished” for ages; doing it this way would mean that the terrain systems are still fairly fresh in everyone’s mind when work goes ahead on other features which rely on that terrain system being in place (such as dungeons, which might need to carve through terrain. What happens when a dungeon crosses into a lake? Surely it’s better to have the water movement and lake formation finalised before answering that question, than to come up with a temporary answer and then realise later on that the temp solution isn’t suitable in the long-run…)

Of course, Radiant know most of this stuff already; I’m simply pointing it out as both a player perspective and for the benefit of anyone who might not have realised how inter-connected a lot of the coming features will be. But hopefully this perspective, and ones like it, help Radiant figure out their plans more easily (even if they decide to go in a different direction; which would be totally valid if, say, everyone else is more interested in fluid interactions with crops than in moving lakes around).

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