I want to share some basic information about my diploma, i haven’t had much time last year to avoid the big void here, so here is a little update. Beyond you find a little summary from the thesis and for sure some pics.
Games are an essentiel part of our society. Since ages we like to play and nothing has changed since the new-media-revolution arrived. Games became one of the most important parts of the media-industry.
One scheme in context of videogames is especially successful: the simulation of virtual worlds and their interactivity. The foundation of this success is a constant development of the technology behind the games. Parts of this technology are a visual, a sound and an interactive component. The evolution in terms of technology is heavily linked to hardware-development. The applications are simply following the hardware-enhancements.
In the past, nobody thought it would be possible to have volumetric clouds rendered in real-time, or that you can have an exorbitant count of polygons in one scene. There is a nice side-effect of this strong link between hardware- and application-enhancements. Gamers are able to enjoy innovations all the time.
In context of videogames, the main improvements that have been made where related to graphic and interactive components. When we talk about interactivity, we are talking about physical simulation and how we are able to achieve realistic behaviour in a virtual environment.Just think about simple things like open a door or a ball that is falling down to the floor or even more complex things like steering a car in a realistic manner. Physic-simulation is a very important part for video-games.
The simulation of complex physical behaviour is usually only limited by the available hardware. A major target of this paper is to have a proof of concept for typical end-user hardware like a game-console.
Microsoft is offering the XNA framework for their game-console Xbox 360. So it is possible for every developer to have their applications run on the console.The area of research i have chosen, is the realistic simulation and visualization of fluids in context of real-time environments. A fluid can be a gas or a liquid. Fluids are not very commonly used in nowadays computer-games, but there is a particular interest into this topic. Fluid-simulation cannot be replaced by a more simple approximation. The reason is the good quality of the results produced by a fluid-simulation. New hardware, especially massiv-parallel systems like the GPU, allows us to have realtime simulation implemented into interactive environments. This paper should give a comprehensive overview about fluid-simulation and visualization.
