Data Oriented Interactive Water : An Interactive Water Simulation For PlayStation 3

Abstract: In this report, a method for simulating interactive height-field based water on a parallel architecture is presented. This simulation is designed for faster than real time applications and is highly suitable for video games on current generation home computers. Specifically, the implementation proposed in this report is targeted at the Sony PlayStation 3. This platform requires code to be both highly parallelized and data oriented in order to take advantage of the available hardware which makes it an ideal platform for evaluating parallel code. The simulation captures the dispersive property of water and is scalable from small collections of water to large lakes. It also uses dynamic Level Of Detail to achieve constant performance while at the same time presenting high fidelity animated water to the player. This report describes the simulation method and implementation in detail along with a performance analysis and discussion.