B UMP AND F L E X

A few years ago, Phil Maguire (above) was earning plaudits for coding Autolog, the realtime leaderboard system in NFS: Hot Pursuit that’s been widely imitated since. When we visit, he’s coding a suspension system for a mop bucket but, if anything, the work he’s doing now will prove more influential than Autolog.

Maguire’s work is achingly modern, but also dates back to the 1970s, when NASA engineers were breaking ground in smooth particle hydrodynamics – using particles to simulate the behaviour of fluids. “It was used to extrapolate values across the solar system,” he tells us. “You take a point in one place and work out what that value would be somewhere else. The real challenge with trying to do liquids in software is you can’t simulate everything to the level of the atom.” Drawing on research from Unreal Partner developer Mike Skolones and Flex creator Miles Macklin, Maguire worked out how modern GPUs could simulate the behaviour of liquids by converting a body of fluid into thousands of small spheres.

“What these smart guys have been doing is simulating it using particles, which [today’s] systems are really good at,” Maguire explains. “And you can work out what the quantity of the liquid fluid simulation is at each of these different particles. All of a sudden you’ve got something you’ve never seen before in a game: a fluid simulation.” For now, it’s defining the splatters of ketchup, mustard and paint caused by a flaming golf ball. Its potential influence on the videogame industry at large, however, is enormous.