Of water and waves

[fabio]

OK, I tested it. r12814, Cycladic Arcipelago 1 while viewing sea and a shoreline, changing options with the in-game menu:

I'm mainly asking or the difference between fancy and superfancy. The reflections/refractions are really causing the lag with the water.

1. No Water Reflections / No Advanced Water: 20-24 fps
   
2. Water Reflections / No Advanced Water: 15 fps
   
3. No Water Reflections / Advanced Water: (this combination looks the same as the first one)
   
4. Water Reflections / Advanced Water: 11-12 fps
   

EDIT: Core Duo, Radeon X1600, 1024x768 windowed mode, Shadow PCF disabled, Ubuntu 32 bit with r300 mesa driver from git.

Do these black areas move? Are they waviness dependent?

Yes, the little dark points move, and I can see a repeating pattern on both space and time.

Edited November 3, 2012 by fabio

[fabio]

On the new Polynesia the darker areas are more noticeable and it's clear that they are the waves:

Note: attaching a file in the forum gives: "Error The server returned an error during upload"

[dvangennip]

I tested the performance on the Polynesia map. My 2007 MacBook Pro (OS X 10.6.8, 2.2 GHz Core2Duo processor, 4 Gb RAM) with a 128Mb GeForce 8600M GT manages to score 22 fps without fancywater or superfancywater. Enabling fancywater drops the framerate to about 11 fps, and superfancywater further reduces it to 7 fps. The display had a resolution of 1920x1080. I tested it with the same view in each condition, and I had the quality settings on 10, with everything enabled.

So for older computers with meagre graphics cards there is a notably difference between the two fancywater shaders. In short it means I should adjust my settings and leave the fancy stuff to the cool kids

[feneur]

I tested the performance on the Polynesia map. My 2007 MacBook Pro (OS X 10.6.8, 2.2 GHz Core2Duo processor, 4 Gb RAM) with a 128Mb GeForce 8600M GT manages to score 22 fps without fancywater or superfancywater. Enabling fancywater drops the framerate to about 11 fps, and superfancywater further reduces it to 7 fps. The display had a resolution of 1920x1080. I tested it with the same view in each condition, and I had the quality settings on 10, with everything enabled.

So for older computers with meagre graphics cards there is a notably difference between the two fancywater shaders. In short it means I should adjust my settings and leave the fancy stuff to the cool kids

Have you tried lowering the resolution? Not sure how much difference that makes, but 1920x1080 sounds like enough that lowering it could make some difference

[wraitii]

Thanks for the reports everybody. I'm going to go through with the afore-mentionned plan, having 5 different levels of details, so that should allow everybody to enjoy the water to its fullest.

Fabio: could be related to the FBO used when rendering the shore waves, I'll have to ask you again when the 5 different level of details are done (the latest would only add shore waves).

[k776]

@wraitii: I think being able to enable disable different settings would be wiser than a high/medium low. The GUI might do high/med/low, but underneath, it would just be settings these:

renderer.water.fancy = true # colour based on depth

renderer.water.waves = true

renderer.water.foam = true

renderer.water.reflections = true

renderer.water.refractions = true

renderer.water.shadows = true

[zoot]

renderer.water.fancy = true # colour based on depth

I believe the technical term is 'absorption' (the deeper the water is, the more light is absorbed by the water molecules).

[Mythos_Ruler]

You are now using "Water colour" and "Water tint" differently than was originally intended, so now all the maps need adjusting. Originally, "Water colour" was just for non-fancy, non-reflective water. Now, it's what "Water tint" used to be for fancy water. Please, give a description of what these values do so I can better adjust all the maps.

[wraitii]

Indeed. I update the wiki about that, and made a ticket too explaining slightly.

Basically, water color is the color at high depth/murkiness. Tint is the color or the water when it's not fully opaque. I'm not sure this is extremely clear, so I'd advise you to check out thee polynesia map, it shows this nicely.

@k776: youre probably right, yes.

[historic_bruno]

Tested Polynesia map @ 1920x1080 fullscreen, map revealed and zoomed out. Both fancy and super fancy are about 60-62 fps, very little difference when switching between the two. Win 7 64-bit, Radeon HD 6850

[dvangennip]

Have you tried lowering the resolution? Not sure how much difference that makes, but 1920x1080 sounds like enough that lowering it could make some difference

I've tried using the windowed mode, so that essentially means a 1024x768 resolution. Then I got the following performance:

• default: 30 fps
  
• fancywater: 18 fps
  
• superfancywater: 14 fps
  

I have to say that just having water in view improves performance somewhat, even though it is just a few frames per second. To be complete, the maximum performance I could get with everything turned off in the settings panel (e.g., shadows, particles, all water effects) is just 42 fps with this resolution. I'm sure if I ran the game on Windows 7 on the same MacBook performance would be much better (easily 10 fps better), but I no longer have Windows installed so I can no longer compare that.

At any rate, it shows the differences between the two more advanced water shaders isn't very large, but best left to more capable systems.

[wraitii]

Okay, so given what I had as feedback, I just pushed a huge commit that basically allows to enable water features individually. It kind of highlights why we need a real settings window, though.

You can turn on/off foam, waves, use of "3D" waviness or fake waviness, HQ waviness (cheap, should probably be default actually), reflections and refractions, use of real or fake depth, use of shadows on water or not. The default setting is now a slightly better fancywater.

The fixed function is only called if the player set it in the config or if it can't render any better.

Disabling reflections is a huge performance boost, though I should ultimately show the sky (for now it reflects the sky color), disabling refractions also improves it slightly.

To those who had graphical issues, particularly Lion Kanzen, could you try to check which feature doesn't work/crashes?

Again, please report on performance/possible bugs.

@Historic_bruno: just did a change with this message, Atlas now only updates on terrain change (and should only update when the terrain has finished changing, but that's a tad buggy). It should be acceptably slow, ie doable. Disabling waves should make it faster, too, so please report.

[wraitii]

It should require a recompilation, and I believe there has been no automatic build yet.

[wraitii]

It appears you don't have the new settings, have you updated to the latest SVN?

[wraitii]

You mean the setting window is still the same for you, after having updated to the latest SVN?

Plumo: I'm committing a change anytime for the Belgian Bog as a way to test a slight shader change.

[wraitii]

Okay, I see what you mean now. Would you perhaps have set "renderpath = fixed"? Or does the game do so automatically for you?

edit: Plumo, committed the udpated belgian bog, and I just committed a small change to the shader, the water will look more the same even if refraction is deactivated (and furthermore, refraction is now similar between "real depth" and "not real depth", for some reason on "real depth" waves distorted things much less).

[wraitii]

Seems like it comes from the game thinking you're in fixed renderpath mode... Could you try setting "renderpath=shader"? or does it crash? (in which case this is intended behavior, though perhaps I should change.)

[Jeru]

PD: dont let me upload The server returned an error during upload

Probably part of the problems with the server. It should be over in a few hours.

[plumo]

@Wraitii

I'll check asap thanks. ( I'll also report my fps)

[Almin]

How do you look up the fps-rate? Alt+F11 just shows msec/fps for me?!

[wraitii]

alt-f I believe.

[Almin]

mhm, alt+f also doesn't work for me

[feneur]

mhm, alt+f also doesn't work for me

What operating system do you use? Maybe the one you're using is using Alt+F for something else?

[wraitii]

Okay, I just committed a fix for the GL errors I encountered. Historic_bruno, Atlas updates should now work, I had managed to forget committing the necessary file.

Lion_Kanzen, could you retry, I have made the requirements for water different so you should be able to get it to work.

I also removed the "3D waviness" setting leaving only "HQ waviness", I felt it was kind of redundant.

[FeXoR]

With the newest patch in Atlas the water surface is just black even with "superfancywater = false" (with shadows).

Informative files:

system_info.txt

mainlog.html

interestinglog.html

Same in the game itself:

mainlog.html

interestinglog.html

Sorry, but this is not acceptable. It must be possible to turn it off.

Edited November 5, 2012 by FeXoR