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DayOfWar Oceans

Name:	Bill Vee
Date Posted:	Apr 28, 2008
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
Public:	YES
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I have been working on this for a while but have now got far enough to show off the oceans rendering.

Video.
Pics.
The videos shows that the player can interact with the "WaterSphere" just like the waterblock.

It still needs a little work on the shader.
Right now the reflect part of the shader is disabled till I can smooth out some issues.
The main problem with it right now is I can't get it to reflect properly around the sphere.

This is based off the waterblock and I will likely release it as a resource as soon as I can get the reflect figured out.
Shaders are not my strong point.

I am using this spherical code as the bases for a multi cloud and atmosphere layer as well.
My goal is to be able to get a atmospheric scattering effect going.

Recent Blog Posts

List:	05/08/08 - DayOfWar more Asteroids 05/05/08 - DayOfWar Moons/Asteroids 04/28/08 - DayOfWar Oceans 04/07/08 - DayOfWar SixSidedSpheres 2nd try 04/07/08 - DayOfWar SixSidedSpheres 02/22/08 - DayOfWar is a Finalist. 02/10/08 - DayOfWar demo submitted to InstantAction game contest 01/27/08 - DayOfWar Interior Portal Render Test

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Nathan Kent (Apr 28, 2008 at 02:26 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Wow, that's awsome! Maybe you should work on rivers for regular terrains next *hint hint* ;-)

Bill Vee (Apr 28, 2008 at 02:44 GMT)

Note to self. Get implant removed.

Thats the 5th time this week someone looked right into my head and pulled out what I was thinking.

The watersphere has code to allow not building parts of the mesh similar to the way the legacy terrain did for the set empty option.

You can also set the number of horizontal and vertical segments and set the start and end on horizontal and vertical segments.

J.C. Smith (Apr 28, 2008 at 02:45 GMT)

This really is amazing. Good stuff.

Todd Pickens (Apr 28, 2008 at 05:37 GMT)

WANT!

Bill that ROCKS!

I would love to play with that!

Have you tried the foliage replicator on it yet? Also, have you tried cloud layers? I assume that has some issues.

Brian Wilson (Apr 28, 2008 at 09:57 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Bill, as always, your updates rock. It's nice to see some crazy progress with this engine... Some possible future features:

- Volumetric fog (spherical)? Could be used to haze-out ocean floors or to create planets with thicker/wet atmospheres.
- Deep water (darker) for aesthetic and/or functional purposes
- Foilage replication ( as mentioned by Todd)
- Shape replication for cities
- Biosphere habitation (a sub engine that populates the sphere with animals and sentients, possibly including interplanitary travel).
- Atmosphere ( get the nice color haze surrounding the plant that also affects the color of the sky when in the atmosphere). Granted, I thought your inplementation was gonna be more of a moon-battle, but since you are working on oceans and rivers, I see your sights are set much higher.
- Astrophysics engine. based on your past blogs, I think most of your gravity work has been hacks and triggers (forgive me if I'm mistaken), but as you add more features, it seems the natural path is to keep going with the development of a planetary-space sim engine.
- Planet textures, how's the texture seems going? everything lining up ok?

Bill Vee (Apr 28, 2008 at 10:51 GMT)

@ Brian Wilson
When I started the watersphere code I was investigating on possible ways to produce a Rayleigh Scattering effect for the atmosphere. It started with needing a sphere that I could apply some custom shader effects. Since the waterblock took care of the bulk of what I needed it seemed a good place to start. Once I had the sphere mesh generating correctly I was surprised how easily it could be used for oceans.
So I figured it would be useful for the community.

As for the Shape and Foilage replication code there is a little work to be done. Some objects like rocks and boulders work fine as orientation is not that important. Other shapes like trees there is some code the needed to take the curvature of the planet into account.

I am quite happy with the gravity solution I settled on. It is a custom physical zone. It works so well that some vehicles, like the wheeled vehicle, need no code modification to work with it. And the hover and flying vehicles need only about a dozen lines of code each to work right. As for the player class it is almost a 70% rewrite.

My game is still intended to be a space based moon battle / space battle FPS game.
I also thought the watersphere code could be used for forcefield type effects.

As for planet textures seems, my current code takes all six height fields in the generation process to ensure the geometry and the textures look good along the seems.
Edited on Apr 28, 2008 11:56 GMT

Edward (Apr 28, 2008 at 12:08 GMT)

Just as a curiosity, have you thought about planet destruction weapons? in terms of actually showing planets blow up and spawn say a asteroid field. This is one of the most technically awesome games i have seen in my short year and a half on the site.

Bill Vee (Apr 28, 2008 at 13:13 GMT)

@Edward
I do have something in mind for that.
As part of a assault type multiplayer game.
Two sides , one on a carrier/destroyer type ship and one on a small moon with a powerful shield.
Object is for each team to get to the others "base" and knock there shields offline so there sides super weapon can destroy the other sides ship or moon.

Brian Wilson (Apr 28, 2008 at 16:19 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Mass destruction to end a match definitely adds to vs. game. Even the lackluster battleship matchs in BF2042 had an amount of satisfcation or disgust at the end of a match (depending on if you won or lost) when the enemy battleship was exploding. Throw in true destruction rather than particle explosions on the static mesh and you've got a winning feature.

Rene Damm (Apr 28, 2008 at 16:23 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Wow!! Awesome work. Thumbs up.

Rene Damm (Apr 28, 2008 at 16:28 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

BTW, I noticed some vertex popping on the Atlas terrain in your video. That means your geometry tree is too deep. Atlas doesn't handle these cases well and will show lots of popping around the camera as well as collision problems where the player can walk into the surface.

Edward (Apr 28, 2008 at 16:32 GMT)

One can never go wrong with true destruction
Edited on Apr 28, 2008 16:33 GMT

Andy Hawkins (Apr 28, 2008 at 16:33 GMT)

OMG Bill you are a Torque Genius - nice work, and great to see you pushing the boundaries.

DALO (Apr 28, 2008 at 16:51 GMT)

Very cool Bill.....

Thak (Apr 28, 2008 at 17:33 GMT)

Insane! - In a very good way :)

Geom (Apr 29, 2008 at 00:07 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Wow that looks fantastic.

Ross Pawley (Apr 29, 2008 at 17:07 GMT)

@Bill, cool stuff as always. I got your email and saw your earlier plan with your example spherical terrain and such.

Francis (Apr 30, 2008 at 14:30 GMT)

That's awesome! Can't wait to see an update on this, it looks truely interesting.

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