zoot

Yeah, I don't really see the problem in just showing the top part of the 512x512 image?

If the golden ratio ever taught me anything, it's that squares aren't pleasing to the eye.

I suspect the water coloring stuff can go in rather quickly if the team wants, because it is mainly done in shaders and therefore have no implications for the rest of the engine.

Sounds good. You can probably reuse that solution for water also then?

What if we wanted grass on a pitched roof? Can that be done with decals?

Probably not

Some of the slowness can probably be mitigated with the LOD feature that myconid just implemented. As for actors, maybe we can use some kind of UV map (e.g. RGB for color, A for blade length)? Then you could even color it brown, put it on a bear and call it fur

Good question. It could be a weird (but not necessarily faulty) piece of geometry or map setting that throws the renderer off in some way, but I don't know what exactly.

On 'Tropical Island' with your latest commit, I get about 5 FPS with fancy water on and 8 FPS with fancy water off. The performance impact of superfancy water is less than 1 FPS. On 'Mediterranean Coves', enabling superfancy water sometimes causes the game to segfault or hang with this message in the console: *** glibc detected *** ./pyrogenesis: malloc(): memory corruption: 0x000000000e60f530 ***

Nice From a purely artistic point of view, I would probably leave a bit of the sky reflections on just to capture the atmosphere of 'being at the ocean' (because a military commander in ancient times would not hover around in a helicopter above the ground ).

Question: Can Blender do water simulations (like of ripples in a pond) and if it can, can it create animated heightmaps of the simulated water surface?

Thanks for the update. That looks pretty decent, and it could probably be done cheaply with vertex shaders today.

One-minute case study on the architecture of a Roman fountain: (This was dedicated in 92 A.D., but from what I read, fountains and baths were already commonplace in the late republican period.) A two-minute overview of the management of water in imperial Rome:

Interesting! I have no doubt in my mind that myconid and wraitii would be able to fix that in mere instants

I was mostly thinking of them as being integrated with existing buildings/models (i.e. eye candy). For instance, it would make a lot of sense (IMO) to have a fountain(s) on the Civic Centre to symbolize the generic public water system. Your suggestion is good too, though.

Do we have any Roman fountains in the game? If not, I think we are missing out: "Ancient Rome was a city of fountains. According to Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman consul who was named curator aquarum or guardian of the water of Rome in 98 AD, Rome had nine aqueducts which fed 39 monumental fountains and 591 public basins, not counting the water supplied to the Imperial household, baths and owners of private villas. Each of the major fountains was connected to two different aqueducts, in case one was shut down for service. The Romans were able to make fountains jet water into the air, by using the pressure of water flowing from a distant and higher source of water to create hydraulic head, or force. Illustrations of fountains in gardens spouting water are found on wall paintings in Rome from the 1st century BC, and in the villas of Pompeii." Maybe someone can find sources as to which extent fountains were used in the republican period. We can probably do a decent animation of spouting water with a few particles or some such.

Fair enough. Will oceans on existing maps be blue? Or will they need a murkiness tweak?

I, for one, appreciate your enthusiasm This paragraph in your post seems to be missing the links it refers to:

Oh, okay. Well, thanks anyway.

That thing is password protected. Can you copy it somewhere?

By the way: I believe you said that you based this on the 'murkiness' setting? Physically, that would not be quite correct as that blue tint is due to the color of water itself, not due to siltation or other murky stuff. (Or maybe I misunderstood and you aren't basing it on murkiness.) Also, did you consider / are you doing the 'color extinction' thing I suggested in the other thread? I suspect that would make for a warmer transition between the ocean and the shore.

That looks really good. Maybe the texture can improved to look a bit more realistic, but I suspect we can properly get better results with this than with a pure shader solution.

Sweet!

Another thing I took away from that (and other) videos is that the foam looks stronger as it is coming in (the 'swash') than it does going out (the 'backwash'). Don't know how that could be done in a shader.

I didn't want to spam the art thread with debug info, but I currently do not see any foam/surf on the latest commit on wraitii/waterShader, though I did previously. fancywater and superfancywater are both on.