I finally compiled all the references you asked me for under the last post. It's a big list, so brace yourself. Or just wait for half a year until I open-source my own simulation :)

Simulation

1. Position Based Fluids — Macklin & Müller, 2013 - the foundation, incompressibility through iterative particle-position constraints
2. The Affine Particle-In-Cell Method — Jiang et al., 2015 - APIC particle-grid transfers with better momentum preservation and less numerical damping
3. Position-Based Material Point Method — EA SEED, 2024 - the PB-MPM formulation and its position-based constraint model - this one was the reference for the Breakpoint
4. Breakpoint — Daniel Gerhardt - the open-source 3D GPU PB-MPM implementation I actually ported. Just a very solid reference for 3d water. Basically, I took what they created, and optimized it for non-nvidia gpu
5. Unified Spray, Foam and Air Bubbles for Particle-Based Fluids — Ihmsen et al., 2012 - classifying and rendering secondary particles as spray, foam and bubbles. This one makes your water so much more alive
6. Fluid-Sim — Sebastian Lague - you know this one :)
7. A Unified Sparse Material Point Method Framework for Spatially Sparse Scenarios — Zhao et al., 2026 - for sparse simulation. This basically allows to forget about the limit of dense grids that can't normally be forced above 128x128x128 without huge memory and compute costs. But this does not come for free - about 1ms/frame is used for dynamic allocations in my experiments, so the trick is situational

Screen-space water rendering

1. Screen Space Fluid Rendering for Games — Simon Green, 2010 - golden; the depth, thickness, smoothing and compositing structure behind the screen-space renderer
2. Reconstructing Surfaces of Particle-Based Fluids Using Anisotropic Kernels — Yu & Turk, 2013 - weighted-PCA anisotropy, smoothed particle centers, bounded eigenvalues and volume-preserving ellipsoid scaling
3. A Narrow-Range Filter for Screen-Space Fluid Rendering — Truong & Yuksel, 2018 - smoothing particle depth without destroying silhouettes or merging unrelated surfaces
4. Narrow-Band Screen-Space Fluid Rendering — Oliveira & Paiva, 2022 - restricting reconstruction work to active surface regions for better GPU performance. A must-have boost for real time
5. Anisotropic Screen Space Rendering for Particle-Based Fluid Simulation — Xu et al., 2023 - directly combines weighted-PCA ellipsoid particles with screen-space depth filtering

Marching cubes / ray-marching water rendering

1. A Real-Time Adaptive Ray Marching Method for Particle-Based Fluid Surface Reconstruction — Wu et al., 2022 - direct reference for what I implemented: density-grid ray marcher, empty-space skipping, adaptive tile rates, iso-surface search, refinement and hybrid normals. So many good techniques in one paper!
2. SplashSurf - my second reference for some visual effects

What I did with this all

• Ported Breakpoint’s 3D GPU PB-MPM into Godot’s compute shaders - this was a foundation for everything else
• Connected the simulation to editable voxel terrain through signed-distance-field collision data using Voxel Tools - a super-performative Godot voxel engine
• Reused the pb-mpm grid and passes for literally everything. All the methods consume the same values where possible, nothing is calculated two times. I cut corners in foam physics to not introduce a separate grid, preserve cheap depth-map to reuse in ray-marching initialization, reuse voxel world to collide water with usual 3d-models. Such moves allowed me to go from 30 fps 24k particles to 120 fps 300k particles
• Added a support-aware ballistic fallback for isolated particles, fixing the hovering and excessive damping produced by sparse APIC transfers. Without this individual water particles liked to "float" above the water mass gathered in 3x3 cells underneath them. Honestly I just don't remember the reference for this... But this makes water much, much better in terms of dynamics.
• Created this post.

I hope this gives enough inspiration to those in need. Mind, that this list gives you an image of the final result - but you will end up googling "my water becomes a ball after 1.33s of simulation what is wrong with it" - this is totally okay, this is expected. Just keep believing you can do it.

If you want to see more images and follow dev path towards even better results - you can join this info-only discord. No messaging allowed for now, so its purely to sit and wait until I start creating a game with this all. But I post some funny updates there!

The idea is diorama builder specifically about waterfalls and nature - shaping cliffs to see how water flows and finds its way around paths you lay out. Here's an early preview on some scenes that you would be able to create in matter of 10-20 minutes. Think Tiny Glade and Townscapers with realistic water being the focus.

I know people don't like this question, but I can't pose it in any other way. Would you play it?

This is by far my favorite prototype right now, and I'd love to build it in a full game. But the situation forces me to seek validation before commitment. So what's the answer?

За неделю чтения статей я разрешил большую часть технических проблем и могу сделать так, чтобы средняя видеокарта тянула PB-MPM 3D воду на 20к частиц и реалтайм-редактируемый воксельный мир с украшениями. Но я не нашел особо успешных игр с такой идеей за последние года, кроме Tiny Glades и Townscaper. Возникает вопрос - это никому не нужно или никто просто не делает достаточно хорошо?

Потому что эх, ну людям же однозначно нравится смотреть на воду и делать красивые сцены. Где тогда подвох, почему никто такое не выпустил?

I basically took this repository for a reference and ported everything into gdshaders, fixing a couple of bug authors forgot to address when porting this code from that article :)

Now its time to make this all beautiful and put inside my waterfalls project!

After seeing hype of orcs problem I must have toyed with the gpu-based enemies technology as well. It was fun, but I decide not to force myself on the wave of hype and continued search for some more interesting theme.

Btw I found such: my side-project now is bringing 3d water physics as a main gameplay feature for cozy waterfalls-builder: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1w2sb48/3d_water_physics_on_voxel_world_with_procedural/

The game: Mowties, basically roguelite Monopoly.

I think, biggest amount of attention came from this one post I consider viral for my scale of things (respect to r/SoloDevelopment, any selfie that goes there is usually upvoted so much). I also had like 5 more smaller posts in gamers communities as well, and in sum they dragged about 20wl by my estimations.

The demo launch went just crazy for my expectations: having 150 players in the first week, as well as x1.5 wishlists felt so relieving for my wishlist-anxious brain! I even got a couple motivated playertesters who rapidly reported me like 15 game-breaking bugs. They also highlighted some serious balance problems. And all of this was fixed in matter of hours and days from the demo release, so now newer players get SO much more polished experience!

I wish you, fellow devs, the same feelings of moving a needle of doubtable success a bit to the success side by launching your demos!

>!It feel like demo spike is over now and soon enough I'll be back to 0-1wl/day grind, but at least I had a moment of this motivating feelings!!<

Last week I shared an ultra-simple scene of 3D PBF water simulation with a bit of shaders on top of it (here's the old post to check out the progress). I've been bringing more and more beautiful bits since then, learning procedural everything from tutorials on the internet - to show you baked SDF voxel terrain, editable in real time, with water reacting to it in stable 60 fps (it can reach up to 150 fps at the moment).

Even more optimal workflow is required to make sure no fps drop would happen in real game, but I believe this will be runnable in 60fps on average GPUs. My setup is mac pro m5 pro with 24gb ram.

If you really want to follow this prototype buildup, you can join this read-only discord channel I'll post some updates to: https://discord.gg/gxZMduG4QM

Play and wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4832870
Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDyxW9y10Fo
Ready to hear any comments at all!

I perfectly remember the night I was thinking what game to build. I love score-chasing roguelites, but the niche is truly filled with projects of any kinds. Yet my wife was able to find something nobody used back then: Monopoly board and setting used as the main engine part!

So yes, in Mowties you get BASE x MULT as always, but now its the board layout and properties synergies that you must use to progress. Situational passives, special buildings, consumable cards to bend luck even further - everything is included!

Have fun playing!

I've been developing Mowties (roguelite Monopoly basically) for half a year already, and that's crazy. During this time I:

1. Finished my masters degree
2. Moved to another country
3. Created a community of balatro-likes game devs
4. Many, many more things...

Half a year is such a huge amount of time. And I'm only at the demo stage now! And I still have only 195 wishlists! Anyway, that's 195 more than half a year ago, I'll grind this up be sure! Maybe the demo will have 2h median huh???

So yeah, call to action: wish me luck please :)

So I've being playing with PBF lately, and nowadays it actually produces some lovely water feeling without burning an average gpu. Sketched some demo scene to share here, what do you think?

За три недели плейтеста полностью переработал визуал и сделал новый трейлер, теперь должно быть очевидно, о чем игра, ведь да. Как вам происходящее на экране?

Потрогать сейчас можно на итче: https://mogmekgames.itch.io/mowties
Вишлистнуть можно тут: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4832870

Сейчас 188 вишей, так что особо громко не получится, но хэй, для первой игры за месяц могло быть и хуже!

To give some context, Mowties is basically roguelite Monopoly. For quite some time I was only sitting in dev communities (like this one), until yesterday I got an obvious advice: go show your game to its target audience. Then I went and made:

• Post on r/deckbuildingroguelike, about why Mowties is tagged deck-builder although it has no deck building. Post link
• Post on r/roguelites, about how Mowties is roguelite Monopoly. Post link
• Post on r/digitaltabletop, about how Mowties is roguelite Monopoly. Post link

And well, players actually came! I saw the increase in wishlists deletes as well, I believe because I forgot to mention to tabletop community it is a single-player game. But anyway, even with posts getting very little views and like, wishlists were there!

So that's the story. What over communities do you think I should visit?
Btw, steam page

Mowties is a combo-crafting roguelite taking place on weird boards. Build unique properties and arrange them into combo cascades to beat an ever-growing payment! Manipulate dice rolls, break the game rules with legendary items, gain a tactical advantage with secret cards - and win another run!

The changelog from my last post here would not fit into a reddit post (by far), but visual highlights are:
- adequate background shader that does not kill readability of the map
- actually 3d map with shadows instead of dirty hacks
- glass-like panels for inventory and boss herald
- physical dice tray instead of the casino reels
- 1e9 of new juicy animations to make this all work coherently

You can watch the new trailer here: https://youtu.be/TL23opifgIA
And wishlist the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4832870

I stopped doing any promo after 2 weeks as it was far too time-consuming and started polishing the game for demo launch on 26.08. No coverage luck so far, but I've only just started contacting, 870 streamers are still waiting for their message!

Mowties: steam page

Due to playtest feedback I knew I had to make buildings pop out of their two dimensions and become "more materialistic". The problem was: I couldn't spend any more money on assets. Thus I decided to create a procedural solution! Here's a recipe for this type of obscure pixel art shadows:

1. Extract transparency, color boundaries, brightness, sprite edges <- columns 1 and 2
2. Group neighboring pixels of similar color in "solid parts" <- column 3
3. Order solid parts by z axis using dark magic of optimization, target is to get "as convex object, as possible". Then also increase each part's size a little, the closer it is to the player - the bigger it is. And, right, this actually breaks the pixel art work, I'm not even sure I like this yet. But such 3d vibes out of this! <- "Part Scale / Z" knob
4. Cast shadows from parts closer to the player view to parts under them and to the background - column 4
5. Build a normal map by fitting ellipses onto the z-layered parts - column 5
6. Apply sun lightning using this normal map: the sun-facing rims of pixels are getting light treatment, the shadow-sided are getting a bit more shadow to pop. Convex shadow map is needed at this step to avoid getting light-based zebra-texture because of the different solid parts getting individual rims
7. Use gpu to not be stuck with 1fps for this demo

That's basically it. Break up the sprite into fake 3d-parts and organize hacks to make it look a tiny bit believable. It surely makes the sprites not look so plain, but I'll think of more ways to make them even more materialistic now. Textures is the next step, I suppose.

How do you like this method? Any ideas / suggestions?

I wanted to build another prototype with wizard casting spells and decided that the best style for this would be a paper-like universe with paper-like magic vfx. So first things first I sat down and created a simple editor for this type of visuals 😄

You can layer out paper pieces one by one and cut holes in them, that's basically it. But wow, it produces so cozy images now! Decided to share this with everyone to check if its not only me liking this.

Edit: if you want to support my current game in development, wishlist it here: steam page

Hi! I'm building Mowties and my current struggle is that the capsule I got from the artists is:

1. Perceived as ai was in use
2. Confuses the players with cats and 3d sometimes

I have mocked up this replacement. What do you think, is it better than the current capsule? Need any feedback

I'll add a monitor later, but the goal is set anyway