wraitii

Yeah, I've checked that out... I'm trying currently trying to get the terrain to give me some useful info, such as the normals (in x-z directions) so that I can put waves in the shaders. With luck, I could reuse Mythos' textures.

That helped more than you'd think: I couldn't get the darn texture to work properly.

The better solution is always Blender rendering here. But for mod support, it could be practical to either include a script for calling Blender's AO, or having something in the game. It's probably easier to rely on Blender, though.

FYI, in the current form of the shader, it should try to simulate a wavy ocean, but not one where waves are 3 meters tall. Something like this. It's practical because if can be scaled down fairly nicely. For really stormy seas, the current system is simply not working. BTW myconid, I'm still unsatisfied by the way the game currently gives you water depth and so on, so I think I'll try to do something with the heightmap anyway, in order to have an idea of the direction of the coast (could be used to properly simulate shore waves). I've merged with your waterTest branch, currently recompiling. And yes, new texture. Basically took some stuff on google, and modified it in photoshop. I'm using two textures, one rotated and moving differently, multiplying the result to give randomness, but it's not perfect.

The problem is that it is animated. If it is to be improved, we need 60 animated (seamlessy) frames. Current size is 128*128, using at least 256*256 would improve the quality. @Myconid: yeah, that's the idea. I'll scale it with waviness, so that on shallow maps like Oasis, if waviness is low, the foam won't be seen all over the place.

WIP foam:

@HistoricBruno: technically, AO could require a lot of "rays" to be precise. It can probably be approximated fairly well, for example with SSAO. I'm fairly sure we can't get a result as good as Blender's, but for most model, and approximation should be enough. However, I agree that it would be the most straightforward way.

The problem with that system is that it requires the water plane to have more vertices than it currently has (I'd say at least 4 times more), and it would then require to calculate each frame the water physics. While it's certainly possible, it's way slower than what we have know if we want a proper result. It's far from impossible, but it would really only benefit for simulating stormy seas.

Well, right now, the ARB and GLSL shaders give the same results and take the same inputs. When myconid implements his post-processing effect, I'll be able to improve the quality of the water with proper knowledge of depth, but in the meanwhile, this will do. I'll try to implement a basic foam, it should not prove too hard. Proper wave breaching is out of the question in the current version of the shader.

Was parallax activated on the unit? @Don't overstress yourself: the less I can work on shaders, the more I'll work on my bot

Very good then... I'll just wait (and no, I indeed didn't need real raycasting, just some info about the heightmap, or the depthbuffer, though I hadn't thought of that). Would this (particularly points 4/5) require rendering the water twice?

I could use it for improving murkiness (calculating actual distance of light underwater), some sort of advanced refraction, and probably would be nice to have overall. It could also fix a rare, but possible bug with water being incorrectly transparent (if you look at the far side of a steep enough island).

Myconid, do you believe it would be possible to (at runtime) export an heightmap of the map? I think I could use it in the water shader to start doing some fancy stuff (simulating ray-casting for depth) Edit: scrap it, it may already be in the game…

It looks like a precision issue in the dot product... I'm not completely sold on how it can be averted.

Could be normals not working, but the parallax works... I'll look int it, but it works for me.

Doesn't happen with me... If you do change the lighting, does anything happen? If you rotate/elevate the sun, does something happen?

It does this only with the temple? Tried deactivating stuffs in the material? (I'm thinking AO/self-light).

No, if anything, in the current state, it's probably more obvious. I'll look into what causes this tiling anyway, because it should not happen.

I figure that would be the easiest way to use the SSAO... It could also be used on buildings (modifying their xml to add the baked texture). This would help with modding support, too, as they would not be required to bake the AO themselves.

Yeah, I've given a look at that... I'm thinking it would be possible to push it slightly further... Of course, we don't need a completely modular system.

To do that (and a few other things), we'd need to have some sort of basic raytracing. We have to know the distance between the light entering the water and hitting the ground. It can perhaps be approximated, but it's already much harder to compute.

Well using techniques and the "ShaderManager", I don't think it would be too hard to switch between two techniques. The hard part is defining the switch criterion. We could probably do it by adding a line along the lines of "<ifCriterion criterion = "distance" value="50" type="GreaterThan">" or something to the XML. Ideally, we'd have a "base" shader, and if some criteria are met, we switch to another (more detailed) shader. This way, we could link 1/2/3/4… different shaders for different LOD, and also prevent this switching by options, so that lower configs would only use the base shader or the level 1.

The idea would be to load two shaders and switch depending on the situation?

Okay, so now it ought to be allright.

The thing is... I can, but the instruction would still be processed (only not doing anything). So from a speed point of view, I might just as well do it.