Water level and Boats floating realism

[Ludo38]

A few days ago I updated the Facebook with a screenshot of the Mauryan boats :

and someone commented this :

"I have a Little suggestion for improved realism. Boats should dive more in to water. its seems they are flying instead of floating."

I agree with him. But as far as I know, in the game engine, the water surface cuts through the boat and would appear inside it if its deck went under the water level, right ?

So, here, I would like to discuss if there is a possibility to change that.

Is there a way to tell the engine not to display water inside the boat 3D volume ? something like that? Like a specific water-behaviour data attached to every boat model.

For my naive point of view, that doesn't seem so much to program, but maybe it is...

[historic_bruno]

I'm no OpenGL expert, but I think the issue would be more to do with efficiency in the implementation rather than difficulty of programming it, because there will be a lot of boats constantly moving around. Ideally there would be other interactions between boats and water, like wakes and splashes. Currently water is a single flat plane, which is simple and efficient, but also has limitations as you observe. Maybe someone knowledgeable about shaders can weigh in and tell us how difficult/feasible more realistic effects would be.

[zoot]

I wonder why the boats haven't just been displaced downwards? There seems to be plenty of space between the deck and the water surface. As long as the deck is above the water level, it ought to look fine.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I wonder why the boats haven't just been displaced downwards? There seems to be plenty of space between the deck and the water surface. As long as the deck is above the water level, it ought to look fine.

Yep. I think these particular models just need re-exported.

[wraitii]

Historic Bruno, mythos and zoot are right.

Basically to improve on this would be a lot less efficient: we'd need te water manager to know about all the floating objects, and then either update the mesh real time, or use some sort of hack to store in a texture that water should not be rendered.

There are ways to do that, but I think they would pretty much all be inefficient on slower systems, which means boats would look ugly on those, which means I think they should be avoided.

Basically the fix is to have boats with a slightly upscaled height, so that the can both appear floating and look nice. Works fine for the others.

Edit: we could do it easily f we rendered every boat twice, though.

[Wijitmaker]

Yep. I think these particular models just need re-exported.

Yeah, I'd keep the solution simple. Just lower these particular boats down into the ground plane a little bit more and re-export. The water won't go over the "deck". I don't think opened hulled fishing boats are worth the realism and extra tax on the gpu.

Boats and water look outstanding IMHO: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16669&st=200#entry266077

[FeXoR]

It's similar to the actor "water_log" more flying above the water than swimming if placed there. If the hight over "ground" can't be set depending on if it's placed in water or on land it still would look better IMO if sunken deeper (even into the ground).