Development Blog

Are we talking water planes that we can place multiple in our map for ponds as well as oceans or just 1 big ocean plane like in LE 2?

One big infinite plane that follows the camera. If none of it is visible, it gets hidden, so you don't need to worry about optimization.

Looking forward to seeing it in action.

I was curious as to how the water would work with post-processing.

 

If you don't mind sharing the details:

Is it a post-process effect as well? How does it play out with possible future effects?

 

On another note: I'm glad you think my crow is worth $.99 cents, can't really say I think it's worth that much though lol. Just my $.02 tho . I'm just kidding! But it does look like a very promising, and it might even reach out to other artists from other stores as well.

Hmmm, my project would ideally use water at multiple levels e.g. rivers with waterfalls etc. is there any particular reason it needs to be one infinite plane?

My first thought when I read this was to make multi level fountain model with the water effect, like this

 

But if I read this update correct that will not be possible?

 

Or can we attach the shader/effect to custom planes?

I agree with Guppy. The effect would be nice to be able to apply to our own planes so that we can make multiple water sources instead of just the 1 giant ocean. I mean creating a giant ocean sort of implies you want big outdoor scenes but that's not where LE excels in terms of performance and indie people being able to populate such a scene. So given the focus of LE pushes people towards smaller indoor scenes why wouldn't that be the focus for water?

Ability to put a small lake or pond atop a mountain and also have a river/lake lower down would be good.

can we get a y height settings for this One big infinite plane too?

i agree with others, often i want fill a terrain "hole" with a small water plane.

not all at zero level. maybe a shader what is scrolling a normal uv map.

The biggest problem for me was reflections which requires you to render the scene twice with a negative scaled camera.. I tried renderering into a smaller buffer to speed up, but it actually ran slower than a full sized buffer.

For something like that fountain I would use a cubemap shader. The water is too torpid to have distinct perfect reflections, and it's not worth re-rendering the entire scene just to draw one little piece of water.

 

More features will probably be added later, but I want to get this working now. I want to be an otter!

Why not customizable like games for people to adjust depending on their hardware :

- no reflecctions

- reflect only moutain and sky

- reflect all

Yeah, that will likely be an option. Reflecting just the sky is especially efficient because you don't even have to do an extra pass, you can just use the cubemap.

Kudos for your water. It is something I found difficult while trying to implement it in OpenGL.

 

Will we be allowed to use tesselation and geometry shaders to provide waves since your water won't be having any?

Can't wait to start messing around with this and the terrain system together to make an island!

Is there any timeframe on when we might be able to test it out?

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That's the plan.

Water looks fantastic. It should suit my project very well as described.

The ability to scale it would be better so we can have lakes/ponds at different heights 1 giant plain is useless unless your map is flat.

Cool! Happy to see that we will have better water! Is vegetation painting is still on the dev list?

 

I'm just still wondering how they can achieve the wave effect on the beach... Perhaps some generated planes that blend with the ocean. That seem the hardest thing to do!

We chased after realistic ocean water for years in Leadwerks 2 and everything just came out so-so. Even the shot above doesn't really look anything like real surf. I think it's just a diminishing returns kind of thing and I'm going to leave it up to third parties.

funny that i have not seen any game that looked 100% realistic. Sure it is always getting better but why should water be 100% realistic from the start?