LogInSixthorns has awesome ideas.
Solo developer Sixthorns demonstrated an amazing sword animation, making leaves around the character scatter in a beautiful circle.
You, as some others in the comments, might think this swing takes a lot of computing power, but Sixthorns says that it's a compute shader that creates a 2D texture, so "it's extremely performant, and I can simulate physics with an invisible cost."
Moreover, nothing in the showcase has collisions, there are no arrays, just computed positions. "The thing is, I'm not simulating each leaf individually; it's a procedurally animated texture using a compute shader."
"I simply use RG channel as if it were XZ in world space. The important thing is to spread the colors in the right direction.
0,0 is no movement.
1,0 is right
0,1 is forward"
The motion was made for Sixthorns' medieval RPG simulator, where all the NPCs have desires, skills, and goals and can live on their own. In this universe, you will be a guild manager, and the rest you can learn from the creator's X/Twitter.
The developer is full of great ideas, like the character interaction with objects when they get in their face:
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