of course I'm a little bit proud of that water, but I have released to source, so feel free to optimize it. I think it can be done much better, it's still looking way too synthetic. Maybe a better skybox would help to make it look more natural.
Yes, my code is a little slow although it's running smootly on my radeon 9200se. One solution to make it a lot faster would be to use a smaller terrain (64*64 instead) and a surrounding ocean plane with a simple animated texture. A hole in the middle of the plane (or plane-like mesh), made with vertex alpha, would then show the water terrain in the center of the scene.
I don't think water has to be transparent as long as you're in deep water. Only when you're near the coast and you actually would see the ground then you may play with transparency. But even here I'd rather try to use a seamless stony texture with texture wobbler to fake the user thinking he can see the (distorted) stones on the ground.
BTW Texture Wobbler was released a long time ago. It was in the news, tho people missed it kind of. It drops MAVs on some machines, no idea why.
The idea of Texture Wobbler is nice, but if I'd rewrite it, I would use a fine mesh with realtime vertex deformation to achieve sin/cos distortion, and not the simple Copyrect Routine that was used in the current Release. I mean, this CopyRect thing was developed for realtime purposes (see code archives).
There was one problem with cubemapping: I felt like it's hard to mix a cubemap with a second texture layer. So I decided to add that sunglasses thing, so the cubemap cameras would see things darker than they are. Additionally the EntityColor Command is used to adjust the influence of the second (non cubemap) texture layer. well, that wasn't absolutely correct: layer 0 is the animtexture and layer 1 is the cubemap. For some reason entitycolor didn't affect the cubemap texture.
Now common, gimme some water!
Yes, my code is a little slow although it's running smootly on my radeon 9200se. One solution to make it a lot faster would be to use a smaller terrain (64*64 instead) and a surrounding ocean plane with a simple animated texture. A hole in the middle of the plane (or plane-like mesh), made with vertex alpha, would then show the water terrain in the center of the scene.
I don't think water has to be transparent as long as you're in deep water. Only when you're near the coast and you actually would see the ground then you may play with transparency. But even here I'd rather try to use a seamless stony texture with texture wobbler to fake the user thinking he can see the (distorted) stones on the ground.
BTW Texture Wobbler was released a long time ago. It was in the news, tho people missed it kind of. It drops MAVs on some machines, no idea why.
The idea of Texture Wobbler is nice, but if I'd rewrite it, I would use a fine mesh with realtime vertex deformation to achieve sin/cos distortion, and not the simple Copyrect Routine that was used in the current Release. I mean, this CopyRect thing was developed for realtime purposes (see code archives).
There was one problem with cubemapping: I felt like it's hard to mix a cubemap with a second texture layer. So I decided to add that sunglasses thing, so the cubemap cameras would see things darker than they are. Additionally the EntityColor Command is used to adjust the influence of the second (non cubemap) texture layer. well, that wasn't absolutely correct: layer 0 is the animtexture and layer 1 is the cubemap. For some reason entitycolor didn't affect the cubemap texture.
Now common, gimme some water!