that's really cool =D
maybe it could be made into a game of some sort. something like a flea circus, where the player has to set up a number of elements and try to get it to complete the course.

The fiziness is actually quite realistic. We just happen to be looking at very, very small amounts of water. Fish breathe the 'fizz' in real water.

dissolved oxygen isn't really the same thing, and that only comes in a few parts per million, anyways, so it'd be unlikely to see even one with this number of particles

voxels you mean?

that would be REALLY REALLY cool =D
someone should make a 3d dust toy.

voxels you mean?

that would be REALLY REALLY cool =D
someone should make a 3d dust toy.

The people from powder actually talked about that, but they decided that it would be too inefficient(If I remember correctly). It'd be really interesting but could run really slow if you put much in it

Hmm, actually, the only difficulty with 3D stuff is that you would need to store the 3D image. Then, you just need a creative way to "pixel test." For example, if I wanted to use a 3D graph of z(x,y), when a particle moves "down", you would pixel test by testing if it is within a certain bound of the equation (for example, you could test between x+.05 and x-.05 and the same for the y values to see if there is a barrier in the region). Then, you need an efficient way to check for collision with particles Yeah, I guess that could get inefficient pretty quickly o.o

xeda, i don't see why the movements, at least, couldn't be done the exact same way as they are in 2d, just using a 3d matrix?
the only thing that would really slow stuff down would be graphics.

Yeah, it is more an issue of memory as opposed to computing. The 3D rule would be move down if possible, or choose one of the directions on the X-Z plane if that didn't work, or move up if none of those worked. I was trying to see how it would work if you used 3D equations (I imagined using something like Graph3D, tilting the graph, and having the particles all fall out around the graph). That would be easier on memory, but much slower to handle all of the collisions.

Actually, the other day I just happened to make a 3d Cellular Automata to test the new 3D engine i was working on =P  Here, check it out!

It takes command line arguments <mode> <size>, where mode is 0 for a 3d life-like simulation, and 1 is my fail attempt at a water simulation, and size is a number that determines how big the "field" is.  the defaults are 0 and 20, and i would recommend not going over 100.

Fly around with WASD and arrow keys, and change the simulation speed with - and =

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B7yzzD91paU_aUpwMHhKUEtRblU

Your program has no way to move up and down. Sideways movement is relative to the direction faced, but vertical movement is not tied in the same way. Not sure if that's intentional.