What if you just have a bit of non voxel land on the floor of lakes and oceans then you can put in Subnautica type water in place. Making so you cannot drill the lake floor. Make that part of land non voxel and can't be drilled. Once you add a drill you can bork water so much it isn't water anymore. So my solution is that you make drills non effect underwater. 1.) I'm thinking that the mud on the lake floor is so thick with heavy clay like mud that drills are rendored useless. 2.) Make all land underwater undrillable and they are a preset non voxel land mass but only on the lake floor. My crude example drawing is that you get non voxel land for so deep on the lake floor. So this will improve integrity of the water itself. This mean lands that you cannot drill. If you got a bit of non voxel land that would gives some resources to improving water which is my thought process. I can't draw good on paint program but you get my idea. And again sorry about before I had time to cool my head.
And it looks like crap. And it's running on a Java virtual machine, so we can't expect it to perform like the game engines we're discussing here. There is no need to check anything when there's not a player close by, so this depends on what players are doing. Even deforming terrain is not "instantaneous" and water could perfectly well have the same treatment and always be rendered as "flat" and level, which makes it less complex than terrain apart from transparency. I made the comparison with air (airtight structures flying in combat), so of course everything is possible. Minecraft has problems supporting a few dozen torches, no wonder it suffers with cheap "fluids". It also supports fluids flowing on sides of cliffs and that's not a case we can see in Empyrion. Worst case would be when players dig a huge hole besides a lake, then break the last "solid" barrier. Water should then "flow" in the hole, but honestly... any solution to fill the hole would be better than no solution at all.
So... the current minecraft builds have no issues with fluids or torches. Because their lighting isn't true dynamic lighting, you can throw out as many torches as you want and it's a non-issue. The only occasional problem that you may run into is if you're running on an old low-end machine with particles maxed out, the torch flame particles can cause a problem. Turn your particles off and the problem immediately disappears and you get full framerate. Hundreds of torches with a half-way decent PC (literally any dedicated graphics card... or honestly even modern integrated GPUs can handle it now) are a complete non-issue. Back in like... 1.6-1.8 fluids that were actively in the process of draining in large bodies of water were a problem for minecraft if there was a player nearby. They haven't been an issue in a while. I crashed servers once upon a time but quarying out the area beneath a single block of water (causing the water till flow and fill in a huge area) and then removing the water source block(causing a cascading effect of water slowly draining out of approximately 4000 blocks). The goal wasn't to crash the server... but the end result was the same anyways unfortunately. And the problem I suspect was actually related to the network and minecraft not being able to send out all of the packets to nearby clients for the water continuous releveling as it slowly drained. The solution was to force load the area and leave it, at which point the server was fine I waited a while for the water to finish draining, came back and everything was good. Best way to bring a minecraft server to it's knees these days is to make an animal pen and start mass-breeding operations or just start leaving thousands of objects scattered across the ground. Minecraft doesn't do a great job of handling lots of active physics entities. I'm currently running 2 heavily modded minecraft servers (FTB Omnia and FTB Revelations) and have run a dozen or so servers over the years. I'm really well versed in exactly what issues to go looking for when the server performance starts to tank. Could Empyrion implement minecraft's water system? Yeah, I expect so. I don't know that I'd encourage that. I'd actually think volumetric water similar to Subnautica with some well timed illusions would be better for empyrion. But in the end... I don't know enough about the engine. I doubt anybody here does. I can only speak to what seems like it'd work well for empyrion's style, volumetric water seems like it'd work better. A method of detecting areas that need to be filled with water and detecting areas that have been drained of water to place/remove water volumes with some filling/draining animations. I'm not saying it'd be a simple implementation, I can't speak for how difficult/easy it'd be.
Vanilla Minecraft? Can be. But who runs vanilla Minecraft ? I just use a simple mod for better textures and one that allows lots of graphics controls that are not available with default game (forgot the name, a very popular mod). Just saying that in all these discussions people waste a lot of time (myself too) making comparisons with other games just because they share 1 characteristic with Empyrion. Only thing that comes out of it is that... I'm wasting my time, and most others too. I think I'm going back to edit terrains for a while because I think there may be a problem with stamps acting weirdly and causing bugs, from what I read on may threads lately. In fact it's more in the logs than in the threads, but still.
We can not implement MC water because its to 'blocky'. Would it work if it were just like MC, yea sorta maybe. This is not MC remember and our maps render much further, your hard pressed to get 1000m of render out of MC, we are closer to 3000m of render so performance seriously matters and any moving or moveable voxels are a huge performance drain, its not the same as MC in effect because of scaling. But more problematic is the fact Empyrion has sexy curves, its not a cube based game its a voxel with curves game, which makes water or fluids, very tricky indeed, we just can not have square blocky water it must have curvy sides and edges etc must look like actual fluid and that can be pretty performance intensive all on its own, before you even move one voxel of fluid. So the comparison with MC can really only go so far and its not a perfectly accurate analogy for Empyrion.
My post was mostly informational as people were claiming different things in minecraft were terrible, and they're not. Some mods cause terrible things to happen, but that's not minecraft's fault. That's a mod's fault for trying to do something in an engine not designed to be able to handle it. There are various ways to smooth out voxels. The terrain already uses these and they do a fantastic job of it. In fact when I originally started playing Empyrion I didn't believe the terrain to be voxel based at all. I thought they were using other terrain deformation techniques on a form of volumetric terrain. I was really surprised to learn that it was voxel based because it is spot on and amazing. Like seriously... this is really fantastic. So... who knows. It could be possible to generate real-time voxel-based water that flows and changes and is smoothed and looks good. Or not. The technology behind their terrain is really remarkable and I can't really speak much to what is or isn't possible.
I am up for real water physics so I wouldn't drown myself in my ship (water-tight structures). They should have it making sense, before making it pretty. But since this is a spaceship flying game, walking on moving vessel should come first. Then being able to log back to same flying ship (using Cyro Chamber) Then real water physics.
Actually, your idea made me think whether we could simply use that "mud" as the actual technical game mechanical implementation of that "don't drill here" rule? That is, make it so that if you drill underwater, or actually even in the immediate water-land boundary (shore etc.), the drill wouldn't make a hole but would instead turn that same drilled voxel space into mud terrain. You could even have an animation where a brown sluice flows in to fill it. Would actually make sense: the ground is so wet that you stirring it with the drill just turns it into semi-liquid matter. This would nicely solve the drill problem and then you could proceed to improve the water physics without having to worry about any flow physics or other hard stuff.
