hello, i would like to hear peoples methods of creating game quality water (none of this fancy stuff with ripples and waves that takes like a GeForce 4 just to think about looking at it) whether it be as simple as placing an alpha blended quad some where on the map making a pool of water or what not...

Hmmm... There are several ways of approaching this problem... Maybe I/someone should write a tutorial on it? Your approach generally depends on what exactly you need the water for. I''m sure most people reading this can appreciate that simulating an ocean requires a different approach to that used to simulate a pond.

Simulating ''ponds'' or patches of water - whatever you want to describe it as - is quite straight forward and often evaluates to animating a texture on a surface or animating the vertices in a tesselated surface. Be it in software, be it in hardware, be it on the CPU or be it on the GPU; Most - if not all - of the water simulations I have ever seen have been one of these.

A rather more interesting field of study - in my opinion - is the realtime simulation of an ocean. Possibly one of the most interesting I have seen would be the one used in the legendary Black & White. It looks to me as if they''ve taken the old water ''ripple'' demo-style effect and just mapped it to a texture... To be honest I have few ideas how they did it, but it looks great!

an ocean tutorial would be pretty sweet, one way i would go about an ocean if i were going to make one, is with like a flag effect and a water texture, then make the effect smaller as it gets closer to shore, that way it looks like the waves are rolling in... another way to accomplish an ocean if you wanted to use a bare minemum of polys would be to create like lines of quads heading int to shore and rais ever other row of vertexes while the other rows are being lowered, then reverse... here ill try and draw out what im saying...

---------Line1 Baseline

---------Line2

---------Line3

---------Line4
---------Line5
---------Line6
---------Shore starts here
~~~~~~~~~

on line 6 instead of moving up/down move it forward/back
so that it looks similar to a real ocean rolling up onto shore.
as for waves, make an algorithm that when lines 1,3,4,6 are being raised it lowers 2,4.

i never tried this so i dunno how that would look, i assume the more lines you add the better it would look... i would be kinda interested to see this if anyone makes it

what would make it better is like make extra lines that are like part of Line #''s group that get raised and lowered at the same times, but not as much, making the wave rounded to an extent. what i cave no clue about, would be making those tunnel waves... that would be interesting to see some one make.

It is much easier than that I rewrote trent''s terrain tutorial to do ripples and lost no frames. Ive already written a tutorial on it and sent it to NeHe.

If you want to try it out its here:

http://members.rogers.com/ramrajb/Downloads/Lesson%208.zip

There is a great article on gamasutra called something like "Deep Ocean Rendering And Animation", which is very good. I suggest you take a look.

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