Any Idea on What Water Will Look Like?

Title is pretty much the question. I'm just hoping it won't be too much like the concept video as it looks a little bland. Naval battles are my favorite so I'm pretty interested in the water. I mostly would just like to be able to see my submarines when they're underwater, so transparency of some sort would be nice. Cel-Shaded water just makes me a little nervous, though I fully expect that.

blue


edit: But seriously people its pre alpha, the color is all we know

Have you been watching the Livestreams?

Mike

I watched the last two. Did I miss something?

Well when the Planet generator was shown the planets had some water on them, but it's still early in the development process.

Mike

Oh wow yeah you're right. I guess watching it on a phone the first time was bad hah, I thought it was just a solid light blue. Thanks for pointing that out

So here's something interesting. Even we aren't sure exactly what it's going to look like.

We actually spent some time discussing this earlier but there are other rendering features higher up than water. We may do a better placeholder version soon.

I was the guy that wrote the water shader in SupCom so we could definitely go that direction if we want to. However, we may experiment with other looks.

It is important to be able to see under-water in this game obviously so the water can't be completely solid.

May I suggest that the camera in 'zoom to unit' mode actually moves under the water? You never really got that sense of 'this is an underwater awesome unit' through the distortion of the surface shader in Supcom. It would also be useful for (if) underwater bases to be able to view them without that distortion.

Imagine also the possibility of a water world with realistically deep oceans, where amphibious units trundle across the sea floor in a deep underwater setting, subs shoot each other undisturbed by the surface, and massive sprawling underwater complexes are a possibility.


If you can move the camera under water, it means that you can on the flip side not worry nearly as much about clear underwater unit identification on the surface. Supcom struggled a bit there as it was always hard to see the visual outline of subs. My guess is you could make a much more convincing water surface if you didn't have to worry about making it mostly transparent. My personal preference would be to show underwater units as strategic icons unless they are very close to the surface.

That's good to hear, the water in SupCom looked excellent. I was just having this horrible thought of water kind of like Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, which was cool, it would just make me sad in this game. But I'm getting a strong impression that's not going to be the case.

That would be really awesome, especially on the completely water planets. I feel like that would probably be a lot of extra work though. Maybe an expansion down the road? Kind of like how Anno 2070 did I think? Though I've never played it so I can't really say for sure.

That would be absolutely amazing if we could go underwater with the strategic zoom. Especially since subs (from the scale photo) will probably be at a different scale from the big capital ships.

@Pawz, I love your imagination. I was able to play everything out in my head with your description and it was super epic. I'd play the whole game like that if I could. :lol:

Why just limit ourselves to the familiar? After all we are going to be visiting aliens worlds and, the blue colour of water on this planet is merely a reflection of the atmosphere, which happens to be blue on earth.

It should be pretty trivial to add a colour picker to the planet builder that would allow us to pick our own preferred colour (and opacity), which would help give a unique alien look to some of the worlds.

p.s. zooming underwater = win

So red water.


Now you've gone and mucked up the only thing we were sure of.

water color should depend on the type of planet - if its a red planet, obv red-brown water

as far as zooming in under water - what kind of strategic info are you going to be getting by zooming in onto your sub?

I would just love to see (and follow) a swarm of crab bots slowly ambling along the sea bed, and then watching my foe despair as they slowly emerge from the sea to annihilate them en'mass.

on a related note, check this crab themed music video out It gave me a chuckle.

Got Crabs?

p.s. the lyrics are quite edgy, possibly NSFW. if your not an adult you may want to skip this one.

*drools visibly*

For what it's worth I thought the water was one of the better looking things in supcom.

the reflections weren't really needed though, and looked quite bad

It wouldn't be for practicality. It would be for aesthetic.

The more I read about what you did for TA and SupCom, the more I think you are some kind of wizard. :shock:

The graphics of TA and SupCom were spectacularly ahead of their time, especially considering the amount of units/projectiles, complex terrain and stuff like strategic zoom.

I do not expect this quantum leap in graphics for PA because the budget is much more limited.
However, I'm extremely curious of what you'll pull out of your hat this time...

Not to get too off topic, but it is funny you should use that word. http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wizard.html <-- Wizard in the Jargon File (an old dictionary of programming terms)

I would love to have water be a different colour depending on the planet's atmosphere. I would also love to be able to zoom in underwater. Both of these would be absolutely fantastic, especially for water planets.