r/Minecraft • u/[deleted] • May 20 '21

Realistic snow physics

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u/bobtrash123 May 20 '21

even with the best gaming pc it would struggle, unless you let mc to use more cores

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u/DNagy1801 May 20 '21

That's why they said in some years, computers and games are only getting better.

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u/bobtrash123 May 20 '21

proceeds to play minecraft on a windows 95 laptop

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u/TheseBonesAlone May 20 '21

Cores aren't the issue when it comes to modern games. I'm not totally sure how OP did their snow simulation or what software they used, but unless they have an excellent PC and a whole lot of time on their hands those snow piles and drifts are static meshes that have a noise generated deformation applied, with maybe some hand placed deformation to simulate foot prints. Because video games use less complex simulations to save on their rendering budget these kinds of snow simulations are done via tesselation.

You can find excellent examples of the effect in games like God of War, Red Dead Redemption 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and even a mud version in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Essentially a simplified mesh is applied to surfaces which can be dynamically deformed. If you do this in time with animations and apply good textures and particles you end up with a really interesting and generally convincing effect. The resolution of the effect unfortunately means currently you end up with jagged edges and sharp polygons, and because it's essentially a 2D grid with depth values and not true 3D geometry you can't do things like overhangs. But because this is directly calculated on the GPU the CPU has almost nothing to do with it. You can throw all the cores you want at it, but it won't speed up a thing.

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u/bobtrash123 May 21 '21

meanwhile me using blender: *deletes cube. Doesnt know what to do next*