I'm working on a (somewhat) realistic surfing game. Tired of arcade-style games, I decided to try my hand at something closer to the real sport, focusing on realistic breaking waves, speed generation and carving, rather than impossible air combos.
After one year of development, it's going better than I expected, so I'm considering building a demo to gather feedback and see if there's enough traction for working towards a Steam release.
Even if that's not the case though, it's been a blast learning about game dev in Unity/C#, as well as 3D modeling and animation in Blender!
Hi I'm a big surfer (or have been most of my life but doing less now at 40!) also building a mobile game in Unity/C# right now although it's not surf related like yours it's actually based on Chinese Wuxia cinema from 5 years spent in China. I considered building a surf one and was looking at potentially trying to 'gamify' a slightly different element of the 'surfing' experience which was to focus on predicting/catching and then staying on a wave at a busy break...so top down early GTA style graphics initially waves would come almost breaking in random spots in relation to previoius waves/sets, but never identical, and you'd have to kind of 'guess' ahead of other AI controlled surfers where to place yourself then paddle for position then try to dodge others on the way in....I thought it could be kind of fun in an arcadey way and not require so much of the physics you're describing, which is no doubt really hard to code...I'd love to see your game though!
I believe realistic fluid dynamics in the scale of a full breaking wave is unheard of for real time graphics, there's just no way to do it in 30-60FPS (I could be wrong tho!)
What I do instead is to transform a procedural plane mesh into wave-like geometry. For added realism, I base this transformation on bathymetry data (ocean floor height), so you can get left/right breaking waves, different breaking sessions, etc, just by defining different heightmaps.
KSPS was my favourite surfing game growing up. What I dislike about it though is the infinite/perfect waves (always a truck-sized barrel opened, you can do tricks anywhere, almost no differentiation between waves) and the focus on impossible airs and tricks.
In my game the waves start, break and end, with different sessions and hollowness, so there's more wave reading involved. Also the focus is on being able to stay on the wave and generate speed, doing cutbacks, snaps, off the lips, etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Neutral networks are pretty good statistical learning tools, and in this kind of application you'll need some stochastic learning, regardless of using a laptop or a supercomputer. It's not like they used an LLM to predict the simulation steps. If you read the paper, they seem to use a simple fully-connected 5-layer neural network architecture, which is a completely different beast from, say, trillion parameters transformers used for LLMs.
First time I came across integer programming (and mathematical programming generally) was when studying hydroelectric power generation planning, for a masters I ended up not pursuing. Then, when selecting a masters in CS, I ended up working with an advisor who used mixed-integer programming applied to classic machine learning models (mainly optimal decision trees). A fascinating and widely applicable method, indeed!
Sebastian Lague is one of those content creators that show what a delight the internet can be when the content is high-quality. I particularly enjoy how he presents his implementation thought-process, eventual dead-ends, and possible future improvements. If anyone here has suggestions for similar content, I'd be more than interested!
I did some language courses, so now I just want to improve my vocabulary. I used anki for a while but once I got out of it I found it hard to get in again. That's why I like those emails, they don't take much time and you can start every day again. Otherwise I just try to immerse myself in the language with youtube, netflix ... :)
Nicely done! I've been wanting to build something similar, but as a tool to assist in my history studies.
Oh, and if you are into timelines and their history, you might enjoy Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. Very informative read!
I checked out your History Chronicle which is pretty cool. I'm thinking I should also use the Wikipedia 'On this Day' API to add events automatically to my timeline.
After one year of development, it's going better than I expected, so I'm considering building a demo to gather feedback and see if there's enough traction for working towards a Steam release.
Even if that's not the case though, it's been a blast learning about game dev in Unity/C#, as well as 3D modeling and animation in Blender!