More Realisitc Water

[andylegate]

Looking at Kemo with the PRPExplorer, one can see something going on here.

Specifically the explorer will list things such as Scene Objects, and Advanced Tools. One of the things that I found under Advanced Tools is something that is labled WaveSet7 and under that is Water01

Thought y'all might find that interesting. I can tell you an expert on PRPExplorer on here is Chacal. He might know more about what this thing is, as he uses tools like this to modify exisisting Uru Ages.

[greendragoon]

It's worth getting him in on the conversation.

[Jojon]

Yes, I do remember the day and a half it took to spit out a single frame, thank you very much (actually I still experience that, since I'm an old fool who persist with an ancient version of the program, running on a dust-covered creaky old 50MHz machine) :PP

I wonder what Lon has figured out, seeing as he is the one who has looked into the animation classes - although our coveted ripples may be well set apart from those... :7

[Aloys]

Last I heard from the Tool Team, there is no support for Bumpmaps. Now I don't know if they mean the plugin doesn't support it right now, or if they mean Plasma doesn't support it.

There certainly is no support for it in PyPRP right, but Plasma actually support bump mapping; or rather 'Normal mapping' to be more precise. But for some odd reason it is not used at all in Uru except in one Age: Kemo. I don't know why they didn't use it more. Why go through the trouble to implement such a feature to use it only a couple times in the games, and in very minor occurences at that. Weird.
Anyhow if you want to have a look at the textures open "gd01walkwaybump2_0#0.hsm" and "gd01bannisterbump_0#0.hsm", those muticolored textures are normal map textures.

I don't know whether there is any plan to support this in PyPRP, this doesn't look like a high priority. It would a nice feature, but IMO using it would just make our Ages look too different from the Uru Ages.

[Paradox]

In spite of Kemo being one of the oldest Ages, it was created by one of the programmers while the graphics code for Plasma 2 was being written. Mark Finch used a lot of techniques in Kemo that aren't seen anywhere else in the game, mainly as an excuse to test them in Plasma and make sure that the material and texture code was working properly.

[Grogyan]

Not to forget Gira near the waterfall, that also has some bumpmap image on it

[Chacal]

Looking at Kemo with the PRPExplorer, one can see something going on here.

Specifically the explorer will list things such as Scene Objects, and Advanced Tools. One of the things that I found under Advanced Tools is something that is labled WaveSet7 and under that is Water01

Thought y'all might find that interesting. I can tell you an expert on PRPExplorer on here is Chacal. He might know more about what this thing is, as he uses tools like this to modify exisisting Uru Ages.

The real experts are Paradox and Hoikas who wrote the thing. Also Trylon and maybe other devs.

All I can tell you is there is an object named Water01 of type 00FB (Waveset7), which is known but undefined in the old public PRP object docs on the COBBS wiki.
The devs may know more but will not share any new information, presumably because Cyan asked them not to, years ago, which may or may not be still relevant.

[Lontahv]

*Lontahv comes back from counting bytes*

Well, I've done a bit of looking around and I've found that water like Kemo and Gira are a single class for all the water stuff. Here's the break-down: when water-ripples start to work EVERYTHING will work. It's not a lot of little things put together to make water like that--it's one plasma command. There are flags for hight of waves and angle etc. I hope to start work on water soon. As soon as Paradox gets his HD controller, then I start experimenting. If you folks can wait a LITTLE bit longer I'm sure you'll get your dynamic-reflecting-rippling-water. Ok, "dynamic" isn't DYNAMIC, i'm not sure what it is but the kemo and gira waters have it.

But, enjoy yourselves while you wait--you can work on waterfalls.


~Lontahv

[andylegate]

Hey this is great news then! I'm glad to hear it, and am more than willing to wait for it. In the mean time we'll use what you all have given us. What we have now, still makes the water look more realistic than before.

I'm glad to hear it's not something that we can't reproduce though, that is good news indeed!

[greendragoon]

*Lontahv comes back from counting bytes*
...As soon as Paradox gets his HD controller, then I start experimenting...

What! All we have to do is get Paradox an HD controller! Everyone pitch in 5 bucks. /me realizes he left his wallet in his other pants.

I'm just kidding. Really I think it's good to remember that Cyan, with this ability, only uses it half the time. The situation dictates what effect should be used, and there is more than one way to render a cat.

Just to give you an idea, this is what I've been working on with my ocean. I'm sorry the sceenshots don't reflect how they look moving, but everything related to the water is animated now and look pretty good.

Water in Beacon 1 Show Spoiler

This is how the water looks from the link in point.


Water in Beacon 2 Show Spoiler

A better perspective look. Here you can see the contact ripples with the island.


What it looks like in Blender 1 Show Spoiler

Here you can see the wedge shaped geometry for the sun reflection.


What it looks like in Blender 2 Show Spoiler

This is a close up of the island with the collision ripple geometry on it.