2 questions regarding water and view distance

[Lazaroth]

I added a (toned down) green version on the last page, but I have one additional question;

how hard would it be to add something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9A6QHLIWg0&t=1m24s
from the unadded Skyrim features video; flow-based water shader.

[dEnigma]

That would be awesome, but I guess it's not that easy(?)

(Too bad they didn't actually add something like this to Skyrim, I was really disappointed with the look of the water in that game)

[Chris]

The biggest problem with a flow shader is that Morrowind's water doesn't define a flow direction. The game doesn't define which way the water is flowing in any given place, because it has no concept of moving water. It's just a flat plane, which forms rivers by having the world geometry clip below it. Makes no difference whether it cuts across in a north-south direction or east-west, the water is all just one big stationary volume to the engine.

[Lazaroth]

@Chris
Thought as much. I know very little about this, do you know how games usually implement something like that? I was thinking something in the lines of cell wide "flow maps" similar to normal maps, but instead of indicating bumps, it indicates flow direction.

[Mistahtokyo]

The biggest problem with a flow shader is that Morrowind's water doesn't define a flow direction. The game doesn't define which way the water is flowing in any given place, because it has no concept of moving water. It's just a flat plane, which forms rivers by having the world geometry clip below it. Makes no difference whether it cuts across in a north-south direction or east-west, the water is all just one big stationary volume to the engine.

Well, generally with requests like these it's fairly evident that the base game doesn't provide any info on it. I think the real question is, would it be possible to have the engine support flow direction if (perhaps via .esp) a flow direction is established by a mod?

[Pherim]

I believe the problem is, as was said above, that there is just one single water plane for the entire game world, and everything is exactly at the same height - so the river in Balmora is exactly at sea level and so forth. You can see that for yourself, just enter "tcl" in the console and fly below the ground anywhere in the game world - you will always see water below. In order to change that one would have to completely redesign the water system so that it can have different kinds of water in different places. I'm sure something like this is planned for the future of OpenMW, but even then it still needs to be modded. Might take some time before we'll actually see something like that in the game.

[Lazaroth]

Since we have nice water again, with some added settings, I thought I'd check out some "modding" - again.

I think WIND_DIR and WIND_SPEED are new settings, so this is me trying to make the water flow in a more natural way. Anyway, here's what I came up with:

http://i.imgur.com/bU9AFPt.jpg (looks better when moving)

shaders.7z

(647.9 KiB) Downloaded 292 times

(put into the resources\shaders dir) A good spot to see it is "coc khuul".

One thing to note is that I'm changing the water_nm this time, to a less diffuse version. This together with me upping the size from 128 to 1024, gives it a more natural and less oily look. 512 works too, kinda, but 256 gets too oily imo.

[EmperorArthur]

These look awesome!

It looks like the best place to implement all of this is in the weather code.

The only problem is you run into this sort of slippery slope about de-hardcoding. You could put the locations of all the shaders in the fallback file, but at that point you've set up a (workable) method for every resource that's currently hard coded.

[Mistahtokyo]

The biggest problem with a flow shader is that Morrowind's water doesn't define a flow direction. The game doesn't define which way the water is flowing in any given place, because it has no concept of moving water. It's just a flat plane, which forms rivers by having the world geometry clip below it. Makes no difference whether it cuts across in a north-south direction or east-west, the water is all just one big stationary volume to the engine.

I figured that if this were to be implemented, the shader would establish a default flow direction (whatever direction current vanilla water uses), which could then be changed by mods. Like drawing some arrows or something via the Editor.

[johndh]

Ideally, I think it would be good to have water at different elevations, and then the engine would calculate flow from that (or a script could bake it into the game/mod file?), so a river at a higher elevation flows into a lake at lower elevation. I understand that fluid physics can be computationally heavy, though.