GTA V – The Wormy Fountain | Hacker News Reader

GTA V – The Wormy Fountain

simonschreibt.de

259 pointstobr67 comments

It's quite possible to do an impressive water simulation in real time. Here's one on WebGL.[1] Very impressive demo. But you need most of a GPU to do it.

The fountains in GTA V are just playing a short texture animation on repeat, plus a particle effect for water droplets. They have a whole game to run and can't devote too many resources to water. GTA V does amazingly well at keeping a large number of active objects moving around.

GTA's ocean water is quite elaborate. There are waves, you can jet-ski on it, and the effects all work together well. Much more impressive than the fountains.

I once briefly met the guy who did the first good water shader, for Softimage. That had synchronized levels of detail, so you could see fine detail close up yet see all the way to the horizon, and the waves matched up. Not real-time, but it was the 1990s. First used on Waterworld, which didn't get that guy any attention. Then used on Titanic, which did.

[1] http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/

Your water simulation example isn't impressive. It doesn't splash nor wave. It's just a simple rippling, refracting surface.

Try pressing 'G' to turn on gravity.

Also click and drag the ball, lift it up then press G to see it bob around and displace the water.

Forget "Men Who Stare At Goats" - now we have "Thugs who Stare At Fountains" :D

But jokes aside, this is a really interesting and approachable article! It just suffers a little bit from the writer not being a native speaker. I'm German myself, maybe that's why I notice the German tendency to "concatenate" words (e.g. "surface-topology" or "cloth-simulation") even more when it is (mis)used in English? Just some constructive criticism, in case the author reads this...

...and of course it should be "Mortal Kombat" ;)

When I saw this I’ve thought the author used a dash to indicate irony or something along those lines.

I didn’t see any irony so assumed I lack context.

Nah, no irony :D Just a lack of English knowledge. The truth is often very boring :D

Yes, great video! As a non-German I found the author's accent and germanisms added to its charm =]

Thanks for the hints! :) Yeah my English isn't that good. I use it sometimes to - often - to make sure its understood that the words belong together but let me look up the rules... ...ah, there is no rule :D It is recommented to check the dictionary :D

p.s. I've also changed it to Mortal Kombat :)

Getting a hang of when to use "its" and "it's" is more important, if you don't mind me saying so.

It's not like native speakers care for the distinction.

Thats a pretty low bar too set. in a informal context, native speakers will forgive most other grammatical mistakes as well.

I see what you did there, I think. It’s interesting: I don’t mind capitalization and the a/an substitution here, although I could see the capitalization being confusing in another context. However, it’s/its and to/too almost always take me out of the flow of the text and force me to read it again to figure out the proper meaning. As a native speaker, I would still say I forgive the mistakes, but they do undoubtedly hurt my comprehension of whatever I’m reading.

As a reader I think that distinction is more important than whether using a hyphen is correct, assuming the goal is to make oneself understood. That's all I meant.

I was just double-checking my text but I think "it's" and "its" should be used correctly. But if you spot a mistake, feel free to give me a hint. I would love to correct it :)

That was truly amazing fluid motion at the end of your video! with a couple of tweaks to hide the looping I can see this being used everywhere.

The water effects in "Sea of Thieves" are extraordinary.

I'm not a big game player, but am tempted to purchase just so I can watch the water.

Far Cry 5 as well has some fine water in its rivers.

Huh .. I wish I had paid more attention. I played through FC5 .. it did have some really amazing animation, and the lakes looks cool for sure.

I also loved the cloud-effects from that game. Looks really really cool. They could even form shapes like a huge skill with their clouds.

Love this exposition of visual effects!

Forgive this being slightly off topic, but you might also enjoy these posts of a similar flavour, on the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

I particular enjoyed the Silhouette Effect section in the first of the two.

https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-huma...

https://lousodrome.net/blog/light/2015/05/18/reverse-enginee...

I don’t find these suggestions off topic at all. As a bonus, any rendering breakdowns by Adrian are great. This graphics study [1] on GTA V’s rendering pipeline is a good read.

1 -> http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic...

Not to forget the amazing breakdowns about shadow of the collosus and assassins creed:

https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-c...

https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2015-12-breakdown-assassins-creed...

Great post!!! It remainds me of Okami. I bet they used this kind of technique somewhere.

Okami's wind spiral effects are, believe it or not, mostly static geometry, with some cleverly placed vertex colors and masks to handle the fade-outs. You can see a mini-breakdown of the effect here.

Scrolling textures can do a lot!

https://twitter.com/JasperRLZ/status/1173397034088271873

Awesome!

Slightly off topic but the level of technical and artistic detail in GTA5 never ceases to amaze me.

It's shame it's so muddled thematically but it's a tour de Force of game development

I think Rockstar truly took that attention to detail to the next level with Red Dead Redemption 2. Everything is taken into account, down to the animal behaviour. You can even spot birds! https://www.audubon.org/news/birding-its-1899-inside-blockbu...

I sometimes just start rdr2 just to be amazed again on how far game development has come. It's a shame though that as an programmer, I can't really play games anymore without constantly thinking: "how is that made?" And before I know it I'm taken out of the game and imagining algorithms. Very annoying, but can't help myself.

That's an integral part to me.

Akin Feynman's "Fun to imagine".

How marvelous the true nature of nature.

For me it is the opposite. I've dabbled in game dev as a hobby now and then and it's all code and bugs until the art arrives and transforms everything I've tried to do using ugly placeholders into something beautiful and amazing. That transformation is something truly special for me when it happens.

Same here.

I thought I was alone.

For me I can't play games anymore because there's something in the back of my head going "Why am I not learning or creating something? I should be improving my skills right now."

Very frustrating.

Cut yourself some slack! :)

The brain needs it, and who knows, you might get inspired.

I know what you mean though, but I’ve been working hard to just let my brain rest at times. Games can be useful to turn off or tune down the machinery at times.

So agree here, I built a PC to play a few games last year and I haven't turned it on in months, feels like such a waste of time. But at the same time I waste countless hours doing other dumb stuff that and reading about things I will probably never actually implement. We need to play more is probably what it comes down to.

I set a little time aside each day, outside of working hours, to spend learning new things. As long as I do that time I’ve stopped feeling that I should be more productive when I play games. Took a while but I got there!

I will happily second this. Along with Horizon Zero Dawn, this is the most amazing game I’ve played in years. I’ll start it up sometimes just to go horseback riding along the amazing scenery, or go fishing, or bird watching, or hunting, or any number of the seemingly pointless things you can do in that game. It’s very therapeutic, especially after a stressful day.

I'll eventually play it when I get to it in my ever-growing backlog of games and my ever-shrinking amount of personal time.

I feel you! :o/ I do hope you get the time to play, it's worth it!

Red Dead 2 is my favourite game of all time. It was an incredibly game to play.

I couldn't get into Horizon. The normal difficultly was just insanely hard. I think I got 4 ~ 5 hours in and never ended up finishing it :(

That's funny, I found HZD a bit too easy on the normal difficulty. There were a few boss fights that where difficult, but not impossibly so.

I think maybe this depends on your play style – I most often went for the strategy of divide and conquer, lure individual machines away from the pack and get them one by one from a distance, usually with a combination of hard point arrows and tear blast arrows to get rid of their most lethal weapons. Whenever I went for using the staff to kill a machine it was too hard, unless it was one of the smaller ones. Also, making use of different ammo to target weaknesses in the machines proved quite effective, and after a little while you just intuitively know which kinda of ammo works against which machines.

Hope you give it another go, I think the story really is worth it!

Edit: definitely second your feelings on RDR2. First rockstar game that had me hooked from start to finish, such a great story. I never played the first one, and I'm a little hesitant to try it because of how great and beautiful RDR2 is, and how well it plays, and I fear playing the previous game will feel too dated in comparison, regardless of how good the story seems to be.

Talk about a "tour de force" for video games.

RDR2 is mind-blowing. I've already finished the game, and am still playing it just to walk around and do silly stuff like fishing and hunting, which I would NEVER normally do in a game.

But I can't keep away from RDR2. It's by far the best game ever created IMHO.

I've never been so moved by an ending (I got the "high honor" ending in the main game).

Spoiler alert: https://youtu.be/jc8cWDHRncU?t=5

I love RDR2's world

I hated every second of the main story. I would have been alright with starting at the epilogue and throwing out the entire story before that.

My friends are always trying to get me to enjoy and not skip cut scenes in games so I gave this one a try. NEVER AGAIN.

The world building in RDR2 is amazing. In 4K, on a large screen, I sometimes forget I’m not seeing a real vista. Watching distant weather systems or the subtle, twinkling lights of a city almost beyond the horizon adds so much.

I rarely play games these days now that I have 3 kids under 5 years old. The last full game I played for GTA V on my still working xbox 360. If GTA VI comes out , I will probably buy a new console just so I can play the game knowing that I might not use the console for that game only

Yup, I bought an Xbox360 bundled with GTA V. Never bought another game for it.

Same. Bought a PS4 just for that one game. I would do the same for a GTA VI. It’s worth every hard earned cent.

What I really like about GTAV is, that it respected the time of the player. It does not force you to replay the WHOLE mission when you missed the goal (because of a car accident) but has nice checkpoints. Also it doesn't force you to play horrible missions like the toy helicopter bomb mission from Vice City. With that, it's the first GTA I can actually play and enjoy and I'm sure it will be the first one I finish - except from China Town Wars on the DS, this GTA was great as well :)

>> respected the time of the player

THAT! As a “filthy casual”, I have other things to do in life , some of which earn money to buy these games.

I appreciate it when games let you skip things you aren’t enjoying (duh!!!). It allows the game designers the freedom to throw in all kinds of crazy things, without worrying about losing the audience.

Not everybody is a completionist.

I never got far in China Town Wars. Still have my copy; guess I should start it up next weekend to give it a second chance.

I really liked it and when I was in Japan for vacation I started it again ... but as soon as I was home I didn't continue. I think especially on DS it's a fantastic game and only one of the few with a more "serious" vibe but at home, with better consoles/pc and modern games .. maybe the time is better invested in something which brings even more joy.

Ahh GTA Vice City brings up some memories.

Back then, me and my friends in the building started the game at around the same time. We loved discussing the game every morning on the bus to school. Eventually we reached the RC helicopter mission and no one could complete it. After what seemed like forever, I managed to complete it first. Cue loads of awestruck friends and receiving "street cred". And then, I used to visit their homes and complete the mission for them :D

Now that I am nostalgic, I can't help but remember how much fun we had playing RuneScape.

Same here. GTA VI launch...I'm getting the next gen console.

I'm not sure what "tour de force" means but I agree, playing GTAV makes me amazed and stunned and ashamed and depressed at the same time :D It's very very very impressive what they did.

I'll never understand comments like this. Surely it takes less time to google a phrase you don't understand than to type a comment proclaiming you don't know what it means?

Haha you got me. That's of course correct. So now I did and learned something new. Merci! :)

I love to fly a drone around the map listening to some music or a podcast, very relaxing.

For anyone interested, just install the quadcopter mod, add a trainer if you want to be able to set weather/time of day (Menyoo works for me). Then you're good to go.

> I didn’t embed the video directly to avoid any tracking from Google and complications with the DSGVO.

I appreciate this and I wish this behaviour was more popular.

I especially like how it increases awareness of the problem.

But then the laminar flow video was directly embedded - d'oh!

Fixed! Thanks for the hint!

The "Wedding Cake" fountain is one that this guy covered when he talks about Super Mario Galaxy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k

It's not quite the same, but it's interesting to see all the things they do to get that cool water level effect.

Heh, that's my video! Thanks for the shoutout.

Galaxy has the other approaches too, you can see a Tongue Fountain over in Beach Bowl Galaxy.

https://noclip.website/#smg/HeavenlyBeachGalaxy;ShareData=AA...

A few of the effects also have variants of the "Wormy Fountains" style, most notably in the Warp Pod code. Their particle system lets them do those sorts of "Stripe Particles" as they call them, as well.

https://twitter.com/JasperRLZ/status/1241799758907236355

Just watched your video. It's really cool! (and makes me a bit jealous :D 600k views, wow!!! My best video had 22k and only because it was a talk I have on a stage at UnrealFest)

What Software did you use to animate your examples so nicely? The example-pictures and texts move very nicely around on your slide.

Let me plug this insane website that Jasper_ also made (mentioned in that video as well): https://noclip.website/

I think they wrote their own bespoke per-game levelblob decoders and renderers. Deserves its own HN submission.

Both this and your post on ArtStation look absolutely amazing!

thank you! :)

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