Quote:
Originally Posted by makman94
i guess that the engine you use is not allowing high waves ? am i getting it right ?
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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
