Emrick & AeroWeave
Emrick
Hey AeroWeave, I’ve been tinkering with a procedural sky generator for a flight sim, and I’d love your take on how we could make the weather feel both realistic and responsive in real time. Maybe we can blend some of your aerodynamics models into the logic?
AeroWeave
Sure thing. Start by treating the sky as a 3‑D fluid field—your wind vectors and turbulence models can drive cloud density and movement. Use the same lift and drag equations you use for aircraft to calculate how those air masses push against each other. Then feed the resulting pressure gradients into a shader that interpolates cloud textures in real time. That way the weather will feel like it’s actually reacting to the aircraft’s own wake, not just a static overlay.
Emrick
Nice approach—treating the sky like a fluid mesh will definitely add that dynamic feel. I’m thinking we could use a sparse voxel octree to keep the memory down, but we’ll have to tweak the pressure update step to avoid jitter. Any ideas on how to lock the wake‑cloud interaction without blowing up the frame time?
AeroWeave
Go for a two‑stage approach. First, run a lightweight pressure solver only on the voxels that actually change—use a flag grid so you skip static regions. Second, push that pressure into the cloud shader via a compute pass that samples only the nearest neighbors; you don’t need full Navier–Stokes, just a diffusion‑like update. That keeps the wake‑cloud coupling fast and the memory usage in check. If you hit jitter, add a simple temporal filter to the pressure field before it drives the clouds.
Emrick
That makes sense—flagging active voxels should cut the cost. I’ll try the diffusive pressure update and see if the temporal filter smooths out the turbulence spikes. Thanks for the guidance,’ll ping you once I hit the real‑time threshold.
AeroWeave
Sounds solid, keep the flags tight and the filter simple, then you’ll hit that real‑time sweet spot. Hit me up when you’ve got numbers.
Emrick
Got it, I’ll lock the flag logic and keep the filter lightweight. I’ll run some benchmarks and ping you once I see steady 60fps. Catch you later.
AeroWeave
Good luck—hit 60fps, and if it still feels like a breeze, let me know. Catch you later.