Petition to bring the water back!

nothing! I have nothing against spring. I'm just saying I knew it would come up because I was saying all I said in the OP not unaware that this effect exists on the water in spring.

Hey. I just wanna say I really appreciate your time in answering this. Sure it's not the answer I wanted to hear but I don't care any answer is better than no answer and you took the time and effort, it's really great. Now this idea in me will rest peacefully.

I wanted to show you all this :

@tatsujb your profile picture <3

@squishypon3 ^=^ I k, I k.


I did it to please you all.

I wonder how much coding it would really be to make water actually 3d. There was an old game from 2001 for the original Xbox called Blood Wake which has, hands down, the best water physics in any game I've ever seen, and one of, if not the only realistic naval shooter to date. That whole video's a really good watch, by the way.
<3 Blood Wake

If that was possible in 2001 on an old console no less, I think a little bit of naval bobbing wouldn't be too difficult. Time spent, on the other hand, may still be a thing. But water physics has been done before, and hardware is superior nowadays, so perhaps someday...

You should take a look at offroad simulator.

Yes Please

Yeah, that's pretty cool even though the water acts like jelly sometimes. It shouldn't glob like that when encountering a beach or whatnot, and the hit detection seems slightly wonky sometimes, like around 10:35, but it's very impressive overall. Though in comparison from 2001 to 2013, I think way more could have been achieved in that time.

Good catch though.

Thanks, it's one of the rare sims that are actually good. X3

I can see what you mean, sadly I can't run this game too well.

That game didn't seem like it had anything else to do processing wise except for the water - there really wasn't anything else going on.
PA has many magnitudes more things going on, and if you wanted it to have any actual effect then the server would need to calculate it too (and the clients would need to match it).

I also don't really see what the appeal of moving water is. I don't imagine it would add anything to the game except frustration when your units miss because of it. Adding visual-only effects and improving the water look is all good, but actually making the water move? And then there's the issue of pathing - we already saw with the old water how hard it was to tell what is pathable by land units and by sea units when the shoreline moves.

There are many examples of really impressive water simulations in games. Wave Race, Hydro Thunder, Riptide, are games that focused almost completely on water racing, along with Sonic All-Stars Transformed more recently. Even some of the none water racers like Dirt have had some nice water in them. Gears of War and God of War both had fantastic water, and Battlefield 4's water is amazing. For naval combat Assassin's Creed Black Flag has some really impressive water ranging from small puddles to huge waves. There's also From Dust, the sort of populous meets minecraft game that has some of the most impressive water simulation of any game in years.

They're all on a flat plane and almost all use the same algorithms for calculating the water and the same techniques for optimizing the rendering. These are problems essentially solved in the 70s and 80s by people working out the math. they're also all 2d grid height map based water simulations.

Water simulations for PA don't fit that model. We aren't on a flat plane and as we've found over and over just using a technique we would use on a flat game ends up not working on spheres like we would expect. Four decades of assumptions and optimizations are now useless.

That's not to say they can't be modified to work, but it's a ton of time experimenting and researching for something that'll ultimately not be noticed by most people playing the game, and probably won't add any more enjoyment to the gameplay. If we had a budget that was several orders of magnitude larger and had another two or three years of development, sure. For us, it doesn't make sense.

Haha, yeah, the water really was the major player in the rendering for that game. Though all the boats did have constantly moving parts and somewhat accurate damage skin, I don't think either of those required as much power. I'd have to say about 65 to 75% of the gameplay was just water physics, but that's pulling numbers outta nowhere. It was still in real time, multiple weapons on boats, and all of it was animated constantly. Good memories.

Right, I remember you guys were having trouble or something with flat buildings on the circular planet surface. I guess that makes sense. Fair enough.

And to be fair, I haven't played any of those games (minus a small bit of Gears of War 2 that I barely remember, none of which included water). I haven't seen gameplay of most of them, and haven't even heard of some of them. Soo.. I'm apparently not well-versed with water in games for the past few years. Good to know.

Ah ok no probs.

Yeah we need to be sensible about this I think it would be nice if you guys could find the time to add a few more visual effects. Things like bobbing ships, visual waves, movement in lava would also be cool.

Nothing simulated or actually affecting gameplay, I just think it would really bring the environments to life.

If anything, Perimeter is the game with the best terrain and water physics, as is Maelstrom.

Although weird as hell.

+1

Order of priorities given limitations should be:

Engine, UI, modability, polish, polish, polish, aesthetics

I don't think that wave should get back if they kill the ability to know what is water and what is land!

It would be awesome if you guys could create a sticky thread with the most common feature requests (unit cannon, asteroids, water sim, unit effects and lighting, etc) giving us an indication of which features you are still pursuing and which ones have been thrown out (for whatever reason). Otherwise the Forum keeps getting the same threads pop up time and time again with lots of speculation. Your explanation above is exactly what we are looking for.

@bgolus, for tides in PA, how far-fetched is the idea of simulating the water as a seperate sphere with a specific radius dependant on both the planet's radius and the water height, that remains parented to the centre of the planet, thus simulating the oceans, and would cause craters and cracks to fill correctly as well. As for where tides come into this, the sphere could be offset a slight amount towards any moon in orbit around the planet, in the case of multiple ones, I guess it would be towards the one with the most influence, or the average direction. Influence could be dependant on the mass and distance of the moon in question, meaning you'd get somewhat realistic tidal simulation. How realistic would it be for you guys to implement something like that? I think the biggest issues would be with pathing between the two spheres if they are separate...

Seriously, there's zero chance of simulated tides based on other planetary bodies ever happening.

Planets don't really know about other celestial bodies, and we definitely don't pass that information on to the graphics systems. To move the water enough for it to matter visually or gameplay wise would lead to a number of bugs in the visuals and mean we'd need to constantly re-calculate the entire planet's water pathing. It would mean having to handle real water flow if a naval unit is floating in an area only accessible when it's high tide, or allow for beached naval units and handling that situation. Or it means we don't do anything with pathing and get lots of weird visual bugs with naval pathing.

I could go on, but no, this is never happening.