Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Myxale
Looks neat Philip. And about the water flowing over, well this happens in RL in stormy seas! I think it was kinda nice! Here are some pics about it!
The ships did feel heavier from the look of it. Now we just need some examples about acceleration and zig-zah behaviour. 
PS I so love watching vids of big fat cargo in stormy conditions! |
LOL!
The video is great, and would be great to have something like that in the game. But any attempt of making the ships behave like that and the waves to be like that will only result in one thing: Ships sinking on their own.
I'll explain the best I can.
The ship movement in SH3 is retarded to the wave's movement. It means then, when the wave is going up, the ships is going down, and when the ship is going up, from the rebound of the water pressure, the wave goes down.
What happens?
When the ships is going down and the wave is going up, is the wave height is too great, the water level surpasses the ship's X point. If that happens, there's flooding. If there's flooding, the ship sitts lower in the water, causing more flooding and utterly causing it's sinking.
When the ship is going up from the bounce, and the waves are going down, if the wave height is too great, the ships will float in the air for some seconds. The interesting part is, the ship in SH3 engine is not heavier when it's out of the water. It keeps the same movement, the same weight, like there's no gravity, until it sits on the water again. I've tried for creating great storms, but the results are disastrous, when it comes to SH3's engine.
So I thought... "what can be done for SH3 then?"
If ships don't behave well in heavy seas, let's make them behave great in calm seas. That's what I'm trying to do with this mod.
The waves itself are another big problem. The waves in real life are waaaaaaay smaller then in stock SH3. Even in calm seas, there are 3 or 4 frequency of waves in the lenght of a long ship, while in real life, that frequency goes up to a thousand. Bigger waves makes the ships look terrible.
I explain: if you look very close to a bottle of perfum, and put a miniature plastic man aside of it, if the plastic man looks bloody real and you take a picture, the bottle of perfum will seems to be enormous on that picture. If instead of the plastic man, you put your finger aside of the bottle and take a picture, the bottle will look just like a normal bottle. The brain needs something to compare to create a mental idea of size and weight, and normally the closest thing to the object is the thing taken for comparation and mental creating of the object's mass.
So if you take this thought back to SH3, the closest thing to the ship will always be the waves. If the waves look huge, the ships looks like toys. That's what I've tried to do with my water mod. I reduced drastically the wave sizes, so the ships look more like 3 thousand tons 150 meters long pieces of steel, and not as plastic toys. I didn't manage to pull out the realistic stuff, cos diminishing the size of the waves makes the CPU and VGA card overhelmed with work, 10 times more things to calculate and render, the fps hit is huge. I tried my best to find the middle ground between real-life waves and playable stuff on medium-power computers. That's the best you can have. If you set the waves to be even smaller, which would be more realistic, two big problems pops-up:
1. major fps hit even on first class computers
2. pattern waves looking so obvious that the sea looks like garbage.
Smaller waves = more waves = more obvious patterns. You tell the game how do you want a block of water to be like, and it copy it side by side to fill the rendered part of the sea. There's no way around it.
So basically, SH3 is very limited when it comes to the ocean modding acceptances. Let us hope that SH5 has a better engine and that those guys at ubsoft finally found a way to kill the pattern waves, that makes the water look so awful sometimes.