SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Beautiful Reflections and water by accident

Quote:

Originally Posted by ming

Very nice! I wish someone could figure out how to make it so that you could see into the water like SHIV!

Hell yes, that would ROCK

I've done some investigations along these lines, and unfortunately don't think its possible. I'm sure the SH3 devs also toyed for transparent water and there must be some good reasons why its not done.

The engine kinda supports it, move the external cam to the shoreline and you can see a small amount of the seabed in close to the shore. The amount of seabed that is rendered when the camera is above the water is fixed to a set distance from the shore, and not a set depth. If you make the waves too big then you'll notice that waves receed out past this point and you get gaps where there is no water, and also no seabed.
For a fairly funky effect beach your sub - the seabed close to the shore is rendered where your sub is sitting, but portion of your sub that is underwater isn't rendered at all.

I'm willing to bet that the main reason for no transparent water is the game engine doesn't support volumetric fogging - that would mean different areas of the scene had different fogging levels - one fogging level for above the water, and a different fogging level for underwater. The fogging level is universal, and switches to above water/below water values depending on where the camera is.

That would mean if we somehow hacked in transparent water stuff underwater would fade into the distance at the same rate as stuff above water - you would be able to see someting on the seafloor just as clearly as if it were just below the surface..
So yeah, unfortunately its much more complicated than just making the surface of the water transparent, and the devs most likely realised this and hardcoded the engine to not render anything that is underwater (except for the fringes of the shoreline) when the cam is above the water.