Petition to bring the water back!

While we're speaking of 3D explosions....


Anyone know if th explosions in JC3 will be 3d? It seems like they would require 4 way SLI 790's if so. (lol)

Anyway i'm fine with the water until naval is balanced, then, when i need to pay attention to the water I will want to enjoy the scene.

No, they will never be (any time soon). Perhaps a few particles and particle emmiters for the physic engine, but apart from that: More or less movie clip. Doesn't matter though as long as you don't want to actually compute correct lightning effects from the explosion on the surrounding - and perhaps less obvious, from nearby light sources on the smoke. Ambient light works just fine since you can equip that explosion with normals just like any other surface. E.g. in that "screenshot", the explosion in the background didn't even contain a light source, you can see where the smoke comes from particle systems rather than from the explosion animation (due to not being lit properly and not following thermodynamics), and where the fire is just a 2D texture places onto the base model (look at the tree).

True volumetric pyro effects which use real time fluid simulations are possible - and look quite nice - but still way to expensive to compute unless you really, really need it for more than just visuals.

Also, PA isn't the first game to use 3d fx. Quake 2 did it back in 1997, and they weren't the first either, just the first I can think of off the top of my head. Certainly for realistic games the go to method for the last decade has been photo sourced or more recently 3d rendered smoke and explosion effects on sprites. It's extremely effective and as long as you can't orbit quickly around them (like in PA) it's hard to tell they don't have any volume.

Even PA's 3d explosion effects are kind of a hack. It's a hollow sphere that's being rippled, there's no real internal volume. Unity did a demo a while back called The Butterfly Effect for Unity 4 that has real volumetric explosions that are raytraced in real time, and there's a couple of similar examples on shadertoy.com.

@tatsujb Just a fyi, spring rts actually supports a fully 3d water system available in settings called 'dynamic water'. This creates 3d waves as ships move through it, very nice effect. The default is a textured system however as the dynamic water is quite resource hungry (though quite playable on any mid range or higher gpu)....

yes two. well hidden, admittedly.

yes that's the way I envision it. as stated in this thread.

this was a nice feature even just the way it was. could we please have this again?

Knew spring would come up,

spring has a flat water with a shader allowing it to create ripples next to moving objects. nothing fancy. definitly NOT 3D water.

I knew it wouldn't be, PA is still very progressive compared to other games in that regard.

course not dude.... be real. 3D explosions have o go through the dangerous uncanny valley first. they're never going to take such a risk with such a big title.


we can always hope for 3D particle smoke though.

also is 3D moving water something Uber can look into?

I am pretty ******* sure everyone finds real beaches confusing. You make a sandcastle, go out for lunch, come back, the darn thing is underwater somewhere. Some people do that with their CARS. And BOATS. Imagine doing that to your UNITS.

Then, imagine how confused those tsunami victims were. The beach expands for like 2 minutes, the water goes miles out. Pretty cool. Uh oh. A giant wave. Water suddenly goes INLAND for miles. Suddenly pretty not-cool.

Wow dude, you're trolling, right? Please be trolling.
Anyway, everyone has heard both of our opinions more than they want to at this point I'm sure, I'd love to hear what other people think.

I agree with him.

Highly unlikely to happen. There's been a ton of research on doing real time water, all of which has been done with the assumption of it happening on a flat plane. Sure there have been games that have done water on spheres, but we're in an odd middle scale where the planets aren't big enough to fake it as flat projections local to where the camera is when zoomed in, but not small enough to get away with low resolution 3d or sphere water simulation. I agree it would be really nice to have, but there's usually cheaper ways to get the same effect, and would mean probably several months of dedicated programmer and artist time to implement.

Or we can not have 3d water and fix or add lots of other stuff that would actually be beneficial to gameplay. This is one of those things that when first discussing the game we talked about doing, but almost immediately killed off for these reasons.

Note: this isn't to say water effects won't ever get some more love, just that 3d ripples aren't on the agenda.

bgolus is right. Most the time anyway, suggestions like real orbital simulation, are not really what people want, they just think so.

it's like a kid who wants ice cream for dinner. Give it to them and find out yourself. They will never want ice cream again, and favorite dish will be stuffed bell pepper, by end of week.

you want gamesaves and naval gameplay community, not a mild upgraded water cosmetic.

We all human here.

The fluid shader is currently not even aware of the direction in which the coast lies, isn't it? I couldn't help but to notice that waves look rather strange when they move orthogonal to the coast line.

When people asked for a pulsing 3D water volume, most of them were bothered by the shading on the coast lines - or the lack of such, and the lack of refraction in shallow water. Later one is actually quite simple, increase amplitude, increase frequency and when it gets even shallower, add foam. I don't know though how to align the waves with the slope of the coast line (natural effect which would normally be caused by refraction of the waves in the water body).

I'm mostly missing how transparent water was in the past, land underneath it made pockets of brighter blue water, and it looked so pretty. Not to mention it's texture seemed to compliment it so well.

Now water just look very painted on.

@bgolus
Apologies if this is a thick headed question, but is it possible for water to cause units to bob up and down? I don't know if that can be faked in without full fluid simulation. The reason I'm asking is that I wonder if some more dramatic looking waves are possible, where a choppy sea would cause ships to rise and fall with the water level. So I don't need the water to actually flow anywhere like a river. I have no idea what would need to happen there.

The shader effect is 3d though... Given spring supports a totally free camera mode you can see the height of the waves when you move around.

I don't get what you have against spring....

TA definitely didn't have 3D water, heck it didn't even actually have 3D terrain.

So yeah, it's a simple firing animation, like how the peewees weapons raises when it fires it's burst.

Might be misunderstanding here, but I don't mean the recoil bounce kind of stuff. I'm thinking of how the oceans in PA are just flat and lifeless right now. I thought that it would go a long way toward making naval feel bigger and more epic if it were possible to add a bit of wavy chop to the oceans. So if PA had some sort of faked in water, where ships remained on top of the moving water level (just bobbing up and down), naval units would seem like they were on the ocean instead of sliding around on a piece of glass. I have no idea what would be involved in having the game engine handle the fluid fakery, though.

I was, and i didnt give two shits either. You should change your petition to remove all of the units models and leave the game with just icons for everything. That means changing the ground terrain and sun to ASCII characters too.

The water units could have a animations that causes them to bob, sure. Firing is a little harder since the way they bob should be determined by the direction they're firing, and the way our animation system works would cause the boats to snap when they switch between animations since we don't really blend animations.

You should do that. <3