Originally Posted by Philipp_Thomsen
@OLC, when you tried doing this, did you try messing up with the "SCALE" of the waves, inside the wind configuration?
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I figured that the waves are formed by the game like a napkin, side x side x height, one napkin on the side of the other, like a puzzle, forming the whole ocean.
:yep:
To kill those repetitive waves was pretty simple, I just had to increase the size of the napkin (from 5 to 15). Judging by logic, I didn't killed those repetitive waves, I've just made then hard to see,
:yep:
I just messed up with the patters of how are they monted together. But somehow they just disappeared. I tried looking everywhere, but couldn't find them. Now thats a positive point already, lets go to the next problem.
You said you tried this before and got a lot of problems and consequences. Can you share with me some of them, if you can remember? I want to check for problems but its a lot easier if I know where to look.
I wanted waves as realistic as possible, so I searched the net and found a few sources quoting wavelengths and amplitudes (wave lengths and heights) for different wind speeds and fetch distances. Waves are quite predictable (in theory) for deep water (a hundred meters is more than deep enough) but they vary greatly by how long the wind has been blowing for, and how far it has been blowing (the "fetch distance"). However, by just picking a couple of reasonable values (say, 24 hours and 500km) you can end up with a nice table of wave heights and lengths for a given windspeed. Given this info...
The first problem arises from the the fact that the 3 lower wave states in SH3 (0m/s, 4m/s and 8m/s) would all have very small wavelengths (X and Z scales) IRL - much much smaller than you have them currently in your 4m/s video. Much smaller, in fact, than they are by default in SH3/GWX. The large swells you have in your video only happen at 15m/s (and maybe a little at 8m/s). Once you reduce X and Z for the lower wind speeds, then to prevent the ocean from being a tiny square upon which your boat is floating, you have to boost the number of napkins massively, and along with that comes a massive performance drop.
The next problem is the choppy sea that you dislike. I don't mean the "choppy sea" variable in scene.dat (though that does have an effect) I mean the fact that in SH3 the waves are made up of many groups of waves moving in opposite directions and interacting with each other. The waves in SH3 are a fairly realistic approximation of how large ripples would look in a closed tank, but they aren't a very realistic simulation of waves on an open ocean. The number of "subwaves" can be reduced by altering the "large waves armonics" variables, but you'll always have waves moving in opposite directions, and the more you push that variable the worse the waves look... as if they lose more and more polygons the higher it goes. Furthermore, pushing that variable reduces the amplitude of the wave. This can be compensated for by increasing the Y scale, but because the reduction isn't measurable you end up doing it by trial and error and judging the results by visual estimation. Even if you can be bothered with that (I couldn't) you'll still have all the other problems I mentioned in this paragraph, and I know of no way to solve them.
Another problem on increasing the size of the waves was the fact that the vessels kinda float in the air, in and out of the water. I've learned that the water line actually DO NOT control the floatation of the vessels,
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Wrong. They do interact with the actual waves. To see it in action, boost the Y scale and maxwaveheight, and do the navigation training mission. You'll see your boat interacting with every single wave in a very realistic way (even though the waves themselves will be highly unrealistic :lol:). I don't know how those GWX boys did it, but it works beautifully.
they don't go up and down according to the waves, they go up and down according to the avarage wave height. To fix that, the only way I've found was to decrease the speed of the sea, to match the speed that the boat goes up and down (its pretty slow).
Now there's a lot of things to test and experiment, but not mut issues to fix, only a bunch of things to improve. Maybe we can work together and make just one mod out of it (OLCE2), coz the way I think, this is for the community, so its easier for them to enable just one mod. And after all, you are working on an ENVIRONMENT mod, and you are doing a great job about it. Its more then fair that you take this as a gift, as a help from me. I think that two brains think better then one, maybe we both can take this environment to the next level, and maybe even learn something good to put into SH4, in the future. :up:
I can think of a lot of good reasons not to combine them, and no good reasons to combine them. It would be a trivial amount of work to release a patch to make the two mods compatible - basically a scene.dat combining the changes from both mods - so lets do it that way :up:
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