Downloadable version
Demo video – mobile (480×360, 12.2MB): [link]
Demo video – large (720×540, 24.5MB): [link]

Notes: Open Office Impress | Microsoft Powerpoint | Handout PDF

Also here’s the binaries. I’ve only built them on my laptop and haven’t tested them on other computers.

Note: the shaders still don’t work on ATI graphics cards.

Use at your own risk.

Demo build: Mac x86_64 | Win32 | Linux x86_64

From Dust

A downloadable game, not yet released. The player controls the terrain and environment of an island, moving earth, water, lava and vegetation. It has some interesting interactions between sand and water.

Spec Ops: The Line

Featuring terrain/sand that will avalanche onto players. Below is the best video I could find illustrating this.

Journey

Made by thatgamecompany, the same people that made Flower and flOw, it’s going to be released as a downloadable game for the Playstation Network. Has vast sand-covered landscapes.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Already released, but it has sands – of time!

3D Falling Sand Game

There’s also a 3D version of the falling sand game, don’t know why I didn’t notice it before.

I’ve set up the source code using an Assembla git repository, which lets me add unlimited users. If you’re interested in checking out a copy, send me an email with the account that you want to login with and I’ll add you to the project. I added some instructions to the README for how to build it.

Reference Library

There’s a list of all the papers I’ve collected on Zotero Groups, open to anyone to join/view/edit.

Inspirational paper

Zhu, Yongning, Animating Sand as a Fluid (Master’s thesis), The University of British Columbia, 2005

Zhu, Y. and Bridson, R. Animating sand as a fluid (article), In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers, 2005.

Other Papers

W Rungjiratananon, Z Szego, Y Kanamori, T Nishita, Real-time Animation of Sand-Water Interaction, Pacific Graphics 2008

F Losasso, T Shinar, A Selle, R Fedkiw, Multiple Interacting Liquids, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 2006

K Onoue, T Nishita, Virtual Sandbox, Proceedings of the 11th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (PG’03), 2003

• Has a nice name
• Uses height field for modelling the ground

M Carlson, PJ Mucha, RB Van Horn III, G, Melting and Flowing, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, 2002

RW Sumner, JK Hodgins, Animating Sand, Mud, and Snow, Computer Graphics Forum, 1999

Online Articles

Fluid Simulation for Video Games
Practical Fluid Dynamics
Sponsored Feature: Multi-Threaded Fluid Simulation for Games

Fluid Simulation

Fluid Simulation
Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method
Lattice Boltzmann methods
Height field methods (for terrain deformation)

SPH Engines

ISPH

• Only in alpha
• Windows
• Uses OpenCL
• Haven’t got it to work yet

FLUIDS v.2

• Works in Windows
• Uses CPU or GPU (CUDA)
• Sample of this engine comes as an extra with the Bullet physics engine (but is not integrated in the engine)

Physics Engines

Bullet

• Works nice
• Has soft-bodies but no fluid simulation

ODE

• Rigid-bodies only

SOFA

• Medical simulator
• Has built in fluid simulator
• Haven’t got it to work yet

Graphics Engines

Crystal Space
OGRE
Irrlicht

Other Software

NVIDIA Developer Zone

Sand Links and Online Sand Games

The VirtualSandbox
Powder Game
thisissand
Virtual Sandcastle
Sand Clock

A pair of sensor gloves would provide a lot of control about how you could use objects in the game compared to conventional input devices. For example, in real life you can aim and throw things in lots of different ways (overarm, underarm, adding spin etc), but in a game you can generally only grab, drop, push and pull. For example in Portal/Half Life 2 you can only lift a cube or drop it and it is difficult to place it precisely.

To take advantage of this I think it would be neat to make a superhero game. One where your character has super strength and can pick up huge things like cars and trucks using the gloves.

It should at least give you the ability to throw things, pick up things, turn them over and stack them and pull things apart or squish them together. The lack of force feedback from the gloves could also be written into the story, because the superhero has super strength so objects wouldn’t feel heavy.

Also, superheroes notably don’t use guns, they prefer to use their body or gadgets instead. Batman has an enormous variety of gadgets stashed in his batty-belt, but not a single regular gun that shoots just bullets! (I suppose Superman wouldn’t need a gun, he could just throw the bullets, and hey, you could do that in my game too!)

I think this is because guns and killing are not what superhero games are about. Superhero games are less about killing and more about being the hero, saving the innocent and trying to capture criminals alive by disabling them. For example, in the new Batman game, Batman Arkham Asylum is about stealth, where Batman swings between cover and picks off the enemies one by one when the others aren’t looking.

But I think the heroes in my game would not be the gadget-using type. They would be more like Superman and involve a lot of picking up heavy stuff, puzzles about manipulating objects and big boss fights with lots of throwing and blocking.

Part of the fun is also the fantasy of being someone who is super strong. It would be so cool to pick up a bus full of people and then try and spin it on one finger.