Water surface simulation
by Jeff Houck · in Technical Issues · 05/27/2004 (7:44 am) · 5 replies
Greetings, I'm a new user and this is my first post to the TGE forums. If I'm in the wrong topic area for this post please let me know.
Before I plunk down $$$ for TGE, and TSE (in the future)
I'd like to get some feedback on 2 topics, large water surface simulation and atmospheric/sky effects.
I'm designing a WWI Naval Battle simulation called "Dreadnoughts". Of course, most of the action takes place out on the open ocean. There are very few scenes that incorporate terrain so I need to provide realistic water surface/sky effects.
I've run through the TGE demo, and while the terrain, modeling and animation features are very impressive, there wasn't much demonstration of water or sky surfaces.
In Dreadnought, I need to simulate a wide variety of ocean conditions, dead calm to gale force driven waves, along with the attentive atmospheric effects.
Is TGE up to this? I know it's a tall order considering the dynamics of water and sky, but I'd like any feedback from users.
Thanks in advance.
Before I plunk down $$$ for TGE, and TSE (in the future)
I'd like to get some feedback on 2 topics, large water surface simulation and atmospheric/sky effects.
I'm designing a WWI Naval Battle simulation called "Dreadnoughts". Of course, most of the action takes place out on the open ocean. There are very few scenes that incorporate terrain so I need to provide realistic water surface/sky effects.
I've run through the TGE demo, and while the terrain, modeling and animation features are very impressive, there wasn't much demonstration of water or sky surfaces.
In Dreadnought, I need to simulate a wide variety of ocean conditions, dead calm to gale force driven waves, along with the attentive atmospheric effects.
Is TGE up to this? I know it's a tall order considering the dynamics of water and sky, but I'd like any feedback from users.
Thanks in advance.
About the author
#2
I think the second part of his explanation can help you a bit on making the sea look rougher. I think, although it's been a while since I did anything involving water, the wave action you'll see right now is a kind of heaving, which is done by pulling the polys up and down. It looks satisfactory from an intermediate distance. From a long distance you can hardly tell, which I assume is on purpose. From a very short distance, the waves look too inorganic. This was probably also done on purpose, to save on rendering. I assume you could dig in and add more polys to the waves if you want the player to be able to zoom in to right above the water.
Now, if you want the waves to break, that's a whole other thing. However, waves very rarely break on open seas. If you are going closer to land, I'd experiment with putting the landline on the skybox.
There is intermittent activity on skies in the community, I haven't been paying much attention unfortunately since I don't use a sky. Someone mentioned generating clouds recently. Unfortunately you can't search the body of forum posts yet, so you'd have to spend some time browsing the bb.
The good news is that it will be relatively easy to get the ship models into Torque, mount guns, and fire them.
Making the guns turreted is a problem that the ThinkTanks crew has already solved. They haven't released their solution to the community yet, but I'm hopeful it won't take much longer.
You'll also need wakes if you are going to have an overhead perspective. For that you can modify the footstep code. Notice in the demo that the character leaves a series of marks in the dirt behind him, that gradually fades away.
The challenge will come in allowing the player to individually aim and fire the different guns on one ship. I guess you could solve that by using the weapon switching code. Also if you want to allow the player to control more than one ship, that'll add to the complexity. I'll leave it to someone who knows more about the code to judge the difficulty of that one. The third challenge will be the AI, as your computer opponent will have to respond intelligently using naval tactics, and coordinate multiple ships (I assume). That is probably going to be a bear.
Good luck, and please keep us informed on your progress. I'm interested in this subject, some time ago I contemplated making a game in a similar vein myself.
05/27/2004 (10:52 am)
I second Xavier on testing editing the demo first. Then I'd check out what this guy is doing with his water. He's gotten a really nice effect for calm water. Something like that would make for very impressive screenshots. As you can see, it does reflect .dts shapes (trees).I think the second part of his explanation can help you a bit on making the sea look rougher. I think, although it's been a while since I did anything involving water, the wave action you'll see right now is a kind of heaving, which is done by pulling the polys up and down. It looks satisfactory from an intermediate distance. From a long distance you can hardly tell, which I assume is on purpose. From a very short distance, the waves look too inorganic. This was probably also done on purpose, to save on rendering. I assume you could dig in and add more polys to the waves if you want the player to be able to zoom in to right above the water.
Now, if you want the waves to break, that's a whole other thing. However, waves very rarely break on open seas. If you are going closer to land, I'd experiment with putting the landline on the skybox.
There is intermittent activity on skies in the community, I haven't been paying much attention unfortunately since I don't use a sky. Someone mentioned generating clouds recently. Unfortunately you can't search the body of forum posts yet, so you'd have to spend some time browsing the bb.
The good news is that it will be relatively easy to get the ship models into Torque, mount guns, and fire them.
Making the guns turreted is a problem that the ThinkTanks crew has already solved. They haven't released their solution to the community yet, but I'm hopeful it won't take much longer.
You'll also need wakes if you are going to have an overhead perspective. For that you can modify the footstep code. Notice in the demo that the character leaves a series of marks in the dirt behind him, that gradually fades away.
The challenge will come in allowing the player to individually aim and fire the different guns on one ship. I guess you could solve that by using the weapon switching code. Also if you want to allow the player to control more than one ship, that'll add to the complexity. I'll leave it to someone who knows more about the code to judge the difficulty of that one. The third challenge will be the AI, as your computer opponent will have to respond intelligently using naval tactics, and coordinate multiple ships (I assume). That is probably going to be a bear.
Good luck, and please keep us informed on your progress. I'm interested in this subject, some time ago I contemplated making a game in a similar vein myself.
#3
If you are going to make a naval combat game, I'd recommend using the Torque, but re-writing the WaterBlock for your own needs. You can make some pretty impressive water/sky effects if that's all you are planning on rendering. Do some resarch on large water body rendering and simulation. Gamasutra.com had a great paper a while ago on this done by some of the guys who worked on the water in A Perfect Storm. You can also check out GPU Gems and some other books that have water rendering information.
For TSE, we're planning on adding much more realistic looking water effects. I haven't decided whether to support large body waves (Gerstner waves) as well as shallow ones. It depends on how it looks and how expensive they are.
05/27/2004 (2:04 pm)
The TGE water isn't meant to be a good physical simulation for realistic naval situations. It's just meant to approximate water and look decent without killing your framerate.If you are going to make a naval combat game, I'd recommend using the Torque, but re-writing the WaterBlock for your own needs. You can make some pretty impressive water/sky effects if that's all you are planning on rendering. Do some resarch on large water body rendering and simulation. Gamasutra.com had a great paper a while ago on this done by some of the guys who worked on the water in A Perfect Storm. You can also check out GPU Gems and some other books that have water rendering information.
For TSE, we're planning on adding much more realistic looking water effects. I haven't decided whether to support large body waves (Gerstner waves) as well as shallow ones. It depends on how it looks and how expensive they are.
#4
Gerstner waves would be 'way cool...
05/27/2004 (4:53 pm)
Thanks for your feedback and helpful suggestions guys! I've been looking at code snippets and a couple of research papers concerning water effects I found on the 'net so I should be able to hack away a bit at the code. We'll see what happens!Gerstner waves would be 'way cool...
#5
05/28/2004 (7:52 am)
This reminds me. I noticed the other day that while terrain does not show up in a portalized internal, the water block seems to still cut through and shows it's animation. Any way to turn that off for that internal? 
Torque 3D Owner Xavier "eXoDuS" Amado
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