Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone else is working on the GG water?

Cogwheel Chronicles is open world - well open sky over open ocean - so as good as the water effect is now I need something with a bit more swell like the video (Gerstner formula used for the waves):



But as well as the wave effect, I also need to get the world position of the ocean vertex where the player (or entity) is positioned so that I can get boats and such bobbing with the wave motion - anyone know how to do that? Or is there a way with physics?

Cheers.

That is a thing of beauty. Is it a modification of the water plain or is it an entity?

Hey Teabone, thanks - currently it is an entity - as at the moment the engine water shader runs on a flat engine created plane. This shader needs a grid rather than a plane as it needs to deflect the vertices to produce the waves.

I can see a way to get it into the engine as an option though (I think - as long as a grid can be created as well as a plane).

Cheers.

That looks great.

looks fantastic, well done with that

cybernescence pushing the envelope yet again ..
Amazing !!

That's some high quality shadow work here.

What's the impact on performance?

cybernescence:

Im afraid this is running in the vertex shader , so you will have no way to get the height , i seen people trying to "emulate" the shader in CPU to get the height all have failed it will never be accurate. Ray cast (physics) will not work it will always use the CPU vertex data. Ray marching in the shader would kill your FPS, so i guess your only option is to change this to run on the CPU ( just changing the vertex data ) , this would allow you to use ray casting to get the height. but it do look great

Raising the actual water height plain as close as possible to the lowest dip of the mesh would be your best way to get this to function with water functions.

I've not tried this yet, but I believe you can hide the water visual entirely and still have the functions of entering below the water height occur - drowning and etc.

I've also not played around with the material index for water which could be assigned to entities:

5 = Liquid Splashy Wet
17 = Shallow Water
18 = Underwater

Cant recall if that is still set up with GG. It was one of the aspects transferred from FPSC to allow for water slash sounds for if impacted and also water splash graphics for if shot and etc. Can't recall if this actually works in GG still or ever. Will have to test at some point.

This can be done with the Bullet physics engine, but GG is not using the physics engine properly
to be able to add this. In my opnion it would require a lot of work to fix GG in this regard.

Back at the turn of the century, a friend and I made a game called Water Race in Dark Basic. It had a nice water effect (for the time) made with a matrix which deformed to achieve this sort of effect. It's a pity we do not have this sort of thing now as was fast and had all the height data needed for boat positioning I have never found terrains to be anything like as useful or fast since. I remember finding it out a few years after doing it and even then on a 1 gig cpu (the fastest around!) the game ran at unplayable speeds with a mere 700mhz extra cpu power and a mildly faster video card.

Weird how things seem to have got so complicated since then that a similar effect (although far more detailed) is such a massive drain on resources of far faster machines.