Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink......

  • Photoreal + semi transparent water layer is the way to go IMHO. My 2 cents

    Seeing the Florida keys from top down makes it hard to grant the implementation of a liquid mass

    that could hide the wonders of submarine sandkey landscapes,

    May sound anti-naive but I am positive that below zero terrain can be modelled just like dry lands. (NOAA-dems)

    Put the phototexture on that underwater (negative) mesh (1 mile zone around land) and fill in the semi-transparent water.

    On top of it all add a dynamic surface. Play around with physics and transparency to gain max realism.

    aspects: surface (motion), transparency (layers and ground textures) and of course coloring/reflection of the sky.

    Think of seaplanes or helicopter (SAR) operations, flying by yachts and fishing boats along the coasts,

    seeing ferries crossing and enjoying the fantastic view of the tropical underwater landscapes or the reflections of a thunderstorm developing.

    i pray you guys don't carry this product to grave before it starts to develop to something that deserves the label sim :)

  • May sound anti-naive but I am positive that below zero terrain can be modelled just like dry lands. (NOAA-dems)

    Put the phototexture on that underwater (negative) mesh (1 mile zone around land) and fill in the semi-transparent water.


    On top of it all add a dynamic surface. Play around with physics and transparency to gain max realism.

    War Thunder does that. Flying low, you can see the seabed through the water. Outerra does this as well, and of course, so does P3D with bathymetry enabled.....

    Come to think of it, when I was testing it a few years ago, so did unigine sim.

    I wonder if there are any framerate compromises from doing that. Is it worth it?

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  • I wonder if there are any framerate compromises from doing that. Is it worth it?

    That depends on the technique used for the water reflections and refractions.

    Adding reflections could slow things down, everything has to be rendered twice from another position if you do it properly. There are ways to cheat the system and create a similar result by using the already rendered image and flipping it. And there are probably other methods that I just haven't heard of yet.

    If you we did actual correct reflections and refractions the performance hit would be immense. CGI may be capable of doing correct reflections but you need days to compute them. I'm talking reflections based on the actual shape of the waves, etc.

    Sea through water itself is not that much of an issue. If you ignore refractions.

  • The dream. (for some)

    Maybe one day.....

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    Devons rig

    Intel Core i5-13600K - Core i5 13th Gen 14-Core (6P+8E) @ 5.5Ghz / G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 32GB RAM DDR5 6000 / GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070Ti GAMING OC 12G / Sound Blaster Z / Oculus Quest 2 VR Headset / Klipsch® Promedia 2.1 Computer Speakers / ASUS ROG SWIFT PG279Q ‑ 27" IPS LED Monitor ‑ QHD / 6x Samsung SSD/NVME's various sizes / Windows 11 Pro 64-bit / GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS ELITE AX LGA 1700 ATX Motherboard DDR5

  • the frame rate concern is always welcome to spread fear.

    if DCS can do it,

    and REX did at great job at FSX,

    and Arma does it,

    and frankly, i don't feel a noticable impact source from the water object in any of those products,

    i think we should start to think how to do it and not look for reasons for not doing it.

    I would leave it to the devs to decide whether they can do it and what the suitable latest techniques are,

    despite the feeling that aerofly will no tackle any of such challenge.

  • i don't understand this post or it does not refer to any of the other statements.

    At least i can not remember having mentioned a layer technique for Sea level.

    Not even the sea is on sea level everywhere,

    i think you took a wrong approach here.

    Yeah you're right, I totally misread there, sorry. My reply is gone now :)

  • Trying to copy photographs is 100% the wrong way to go, people do not take pictures 90 degrees to one side with light glaring off the into-the-sun lit water surface.

    Deanl90's pic is very good but the wave size needs to be kept small, big waves come from large bodies of open water.

    Jan's video is of a fairly calm day (waterside waves seen at time 6.56. San Francisco fog is a fameous but also a calm air phenomenon) in a land locked bay surrounded by high ground. They were departing off runway 01 Right and landing on 28 Right, 90 degrees apart.

    The Golden Gates view at time 1.09 shows the bridge towers shadows direction, the sun direction is about 170 true, about 155 magnetic. Some ocean swell and perhaps tidal flow is entering the bay at this point which is the best into the light view. The waves are not visible from that height (they would be visible to the eye and perhaps also in a 4K2K video) but the long wavelength swell hardly moves and the changes are largely from the changing bearing of the aircraft.

    The final approach is over fairly calm water with the light from about 50 degrees to the right of the tail. Little specular return off the waves could be expected.

    Even with little wave texture the video did show that the water lighting was not fixed and varied according to the sun direction.

    Old FS water effects on 'Ultra' are pretty good.