I Just Noticed - Flat Water

#21

Quote:never promised anywhere

I agree. Even if it was, doesn't mean that it would make it in:) My expectation was based on buying TGE first, seeing some surface motion and thinking TSE must have enhanced this somehow with a shader based displacement. Not that it matters much to me, my personal hobby projects don't call for it yet. It's a work mode - on the lookout for something I can use in the future issue:)

I'm guessing part of the reason it wasn't included was a performance trade-off. The land based stuff is the lions share of community interest. The water is mostly eye candy:)

I see OGRE has some interesting water effects including realtime displacement of the water surface (albeit on a small section of water). Wonder how hard it would be to port some of these over (if it's even legal with the way it is licensed)?

I guess it's just a matter of time before someone builds something. Ocean surface effects are kind of a niche area, folks that needed it would probably pay pretty well for it. If there was an ocean surface pack and it had enough functionality, I could probably convince the company to spend a few thousand on the pack. A couple hundred for something with simpler functionality:

1. Ocean surface motion (displacement based on simple swell-like and sea-like motion model)
2. Ability to get Z height at X/Y

#22 I could spend a year or more just writing water effects. Waves, shorelines, relief mapped waves, foam, etc, etc. It wouldn't help most people get their games done and would halt development on the areas of the engine that need work. It's just not practical.

#23 Waves/water effects in general is a huge topic. I've tried a few results such as relief mapped waves but honestly the effect doesn't look fantastic in the long run. I'm thinking of just porting over the TGE water code though that will have some problems of its own.

#24 Well, I'm really not sure if this is the best way but it has some nice effects.



This is a mix of relief mapping and parallax mapping. This effect is done through the pixel shader rather than vertex waves. Basically I took the linear and binary searches from relief mapping and applied them to texCoord2. Then I overlayed another embedded heightmap but at a smaller scale onto the surface to add more detail.

Another screenshot:


Unfortunately the relief maps aren't very clearn in the screenshots. It's a subtle effect but actually enhances it quite nicely.


-Matt Vitelli

#25 Water Video

Because the relief maps in the screenshot were barely visible. However, there are some problems with the vertex shader. You can see some problems such as the reflections.

#26 This is what is called an opening people.... the first one to make a code pack with a working boat and deformable water surface wins. ;)

#27 Vertex waves seem just too hard to integrate without seriously rewriting the water code. I think maybe parallax mapped decals would work well. Sort of like Oblivion's system. It applies a decal onto the water surface and it gives an interesting ripple-like effect.

#28 I took the TGE Water and put it into TSE (MS4) Then I used the DX9 SDK and turned it into a shader material with a noise map. It works with waves but the flow direction wont move. I have tried using the old TSE waterblock and just changing a few things and no matter what I cant even get a response on a debug. Did anyone else attempt this?