This guy would have done well to read all the water suggestions at minecraftforum.net; but, as testified by all the identical threads, its search engine is crap because of the idiotic timeout between searches. Here is a Google search of the water suggestion threads:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aminecraftforum.net++inurl%3Af%3D1+%2Bwater+&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=Mystify posted both a volumized water suggestion and a link to a java game where he implemented his idea. You can read about it here:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15523I enjoyed watching the wave spread out across the water in the end when his FPS dropped. As neat as that was, Minecraft can only run a volume simulation on the water stored in the currently loaded chunks so as you move away from them you're going to see the game lag as the unloaded water tries to equalize itself with the water that was loaded so you're going to see ghost "tsunamis" every time new chunk(s) are loaded and that would really slow down exploring.
I also really laughed at the idea of seeing people digging up from a cave to get out and putting a single hole under an ocean. His video showed his simulator lagging only with a disc shaped area (~ r^2) of simulation but I suspect that a spherical area (~r^3) with similar radius would have stopped his sim dead in its tracks but that is only going to happen if his water isn't looking first at the block above and taking water from the
surface if the block above is water.
In fact, this very subject was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to play around with DF but I think DF would need a
really long time to figure out what happened after someone dug a hole on the bottom of the ocean.
Finally, I wanted to speculate that if Notch is ever going to rework Minecraft's water, it will probably be sometime soon. Notch finished an advaned diving course and that inspired him to think about more diverse aquatic life and so I don't think it is insane to hope he will think about their environment as well. Of course, I'm probably reading too much into this:
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/3095374159/notch-is-still-out-of-the-building