Videos (development)

[v-i-c-]

Originally Posted by makman94

have you prepared the look of water at heavy seas ? can you show us a video of the most heavy state of it?

Basically it is still the same ocean as before.
Heavier sea states will have more foam. This is an older picture before I've improved the light. I currently haven't finished tweaking higher state settings, I'll post something on another day.

[makman94]

Originally Posted by v-i-c-

Basically it is still the same ocean as before.
Heavier sea states will have more foam. This is an older picture before I've improved the light. I currently haven't finished tweaking higher state settings, I'll post something on another day.

even this old pic is so beautifull V-I-C .
i guess that the engine you use is not allowing high waves ? am i getting it right ?
one way or the other, your work here is beyond my greatest expectations so i am really waiting each time your next video with a lot of impatience

[v-i-c-]

Originally Posted by makman94

i guess that the engine you use is not allowing high waves ? am i getting it right ?

No, you are wrong.
My water is a 100% custom solution and it would work in any engine if I would port WOTA. I can use any size of waves and the water (and ships) also takes curvature of earth into account (which works up to the highest available camera position in WOTA). I can add new features any time if the target hardware can handle them or completely switch to a new water shader. (still not sure how I will do it on desktop)

An engine basically does the job to help you organizing your things and it handles low level stuff for you, it handles the drawing for example.

The engine I am using is Unity - Pacific Fleet, Silent Depth, Crash Dive and Battlefleet 2, they all use Unity.

It offers a lot of features on top of the important core things but I don't use or need most of them.
You really must do the work on your own if you want to get decent results. A huge portion of the time for WOTA development is spent on writing shaders or things related to the environment.
The look of your game entirely depends on your shaders, you can get nice results with stock shaders but if you want to optimize your visual quality or need special things like water you better write your own shaders.

Or if you are in a rush you could buy something from the Unity asset store where other developers sell their solutions - I sometime buy water assets to take a closer look on them just for curiosity - this one for example seems to be the one used by Battlefleet 2 (I am 99% certain because I've got identical results when I've played with this asset) https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11384

Pacific Fleet, Silent Depth and possibly Crash Dive use their own water shaders.

At least I know it for Pacific Fleet because I've once helped them optimizing it.
For Silent Depth it is also obvious that they use their own custom shader.

I am not 100% certain for Crash Dive because most of crash dive's 3D models were bought on the asset store https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/2726 (I think Battlefleet 2 also uses this package)
But I never have seen a water shader that looks like the one in Crash Dive so I think it might be a custom one.

In WOTA almost all shaders are custom and work hand in hand, the whole thing is getting pretty complex now. I avoid using 3rd party assets (it usually ends in wasting time and more work than writing your own solution that will fit much better to your needs) or Unity's stock solutions. The performance even of so called "optimized for mobile" shaders is usually no acceptable and beside that they won't work with my environment anymore.
The only 3rd party solution I use is an asset that controls the background color of the sky (Silent Depth uses the same one), but even that isn't 100% the stock version anymore.

But partly you are right, sometimes the engine is not your friend but basically you can fix 99% of the issues.
Physx for example is a bad feature, you can't use it for serious things. It is made for games and not for simulations. I only use the very basic core of it (inertia) and let it handle matrix calculations for me.
Yesterday I had to write my own solution for some vary basic functions of the .NET framework because they were causing performance issues. - I can't understand why they add new features to Unity instead of fixing or creating their own override for serious issues first. Especially if something accidentally disappeared like it happened to a Cg function last year, they said next update will fix it… 12 months later

[makman94]

Originally Posted by v-i-c-

No, you are wrong.
My water is a 100% custom solution and it would work in any engine if I would port WOTA. I can use any size of waves and the water (and ships) also takes curvature of earth into account (which works up to the highest available camera position in WOTA). I can add new features any time if the target hardware can handle them or completely switch to a new water shader. (still not sure how I will do it on desktop)

.......

reading these lines gave me a big smile ! So, we can definetely expect big stormy seas if your time and will ... allows it?


i understand the main points of your post V-I-C and it was very enlighting as i had the faulty sense that game engine is the real power behind the scene.

also, each time you give one more info of your project...the curvature of earth...sounds like 'heaven' to me. what can i say V-I-C.....it is unbelievable that this is a one man show !
i am wondering ,if there was an imaginary company with five 'V-I-C's working on the same project, what would we expect to see ?

bravo, bravo V-I-C , all the best to your amazing effort

[v-i-c-]

Originally Posted by makman94

i understand the main points of your post V-I-C and it was very enlighting as i had the faulty sense that game engine is the real power behind the scene.

I guess you mixed that up with people who mod games or create slightly different games based on another game by doing extreme mods. That's comparable to the difference between freaks pimping a car or building a replica based on another car or a company designing a completely new car model from the scratch. (where you don't always reinvent the wheel and use some existing components)

To quote Unity Technologies:
Unity is a game development ecosystem: a powerful rendering engine fully integrated with a complete set of intuitive tools and rapid workflows to create interactive 3D and 2D content …but unfortunately it does not offer you any tools for really huge environments. Most of the tools are useful for level based games only where you can bake lights, use occlusion culling, static and dynamic batching etc. - I can use most of those tools of the engine for the boat's interior and for animations of characters only.

The scripting API is the most important "feature". But that does not offer any miracles. Creating a game is nothing else but a lot of very different steps of work, some are boring, some are extremely tricky or complicated, some are a wall of math, some are creative and fun - but at the end it is always work and 90% of it is writing code.

But Unity is powerful, beginners can do some amazing (but extremely limited) things without writing code, this way they attract new customers who try to make games with weird 3rd party tools like "PlayMaker". But you can't go that route for serious projects.

Originally Posted by makman94

the curvature of earth...sounds like 'heaven' to me.

Actually adding this is just a few lines of code. The hardest part of it is to remember to add it to everything that will be affected by it.