Does this sea water look like the plastics?

[jdkbph]

Originally Posted by walrusbomb

1000 times to 1, this is the Pacific you'll see when the winds die out. It takes special conditions to make the Mirror w_clear seems so fond of...

As seen... from where? If you mean the shore, that in itself is a specific condition that doesn't apply the vast majority of the time in SH4.

This one of my chief "gripes" about how the water is modeled in many cases. It reflects what most people are used to seeing when they think of weather and waves... shallow water near the shore with lots of chaotic chop and breaking/crashing surf.

Deep water behaves differently. The predominant characteristic being deep swell or rollers with long wave lengths... perhaps on the order of 300 or 400 feet... although high winds, such as you might experience during storm conditions, will compress the frequency, increase the amplitude and create spray. But not, I think, create the "bay style" chop you see in SH4.

Look closely at video footage of ships at sea (taken by other ships nearby... obviously anything taken from the shore is too close) in various weather conditions. Watch the way the water works it's way down the length of the hull and note the difference between the high points and low points.

As silly as it sounds, it seems to me that the waves which cause the submarine to fly out of the water in SH4, are not too big... but way too small. The result is that several of them get under the sub at the same time causing part of the hull to be buried deep in a crest while another part is suspended above a trough. If the waves were much larger... say nearly the same length as the hull, or longer... the sub might look more realistic riding up and over the crests and down into troughs.

JD