dim3 Forum

Is there a way to make liquids ripple or splash when you jump in them? I understand this might be something that has to be hard-coded.

You could make the player script spawn a ripple particle upon receiving the enter liquid event.
Of course that will only work for entering the liquid, not moving around in it. That would have to be done in the core.
(There might be a way to do it, but I'm not sure if it will work and I can't test it right now, so I'll just shut up.)

ℬɩπƙ Wrote:You could make the player script spawn a ripple particle upon receiving the enter liquid event.
Of course that will only work for entering the liquid, not moving around in it. That would have to be done in the core.
(There might be a way to do it, but I'm not sure if it will work and I can't test it right now, so I'll just shut up.)

Yes, it'd have to be something I add. Right now the "splash" sound is something triggered by the player script entering water, so you can also add some effects and anything else at the same time. For rippling, though, that would have to be in the core.

[>] Brian

No, I mean actually distorting the liquid's surface with the sheer ripplyness of the player's mass, not just spawning a particle. I think you could do that in the old engine, and I know WarCraft III has a crater effect where the mesh of the map is distorted.

Bump.

One of the first games I saw that effect in was Alien vs Predator 2, Lith Tech engine that would be. In my opinion it is totally overkill to really transform the polygons of the water. I ripple graphics like in Quake 3 is enough. UT2004 seems to change the Freznel shader or something, even that is a lot.

But indeed water in not a highlight of this engine. Reflection or pseudo-reflection would be cool.

EDIT: I just remembered that even the water of the first Unreal would be enough. Actually the water of that title looks better then some blockbuster titles today.

You can cheat and use the rings system to spawn some fake ripples from the player model.

You could write a vertex shader - but you would need to modify the engine to relay the player position etc, and you could do it in the same amount of work by just modifying the engine (without the shader).

mafoo Wrote:You could write a vertex shader - but you would need to modify the engine to relay the player position etc, and you could do it in the same amount of work by just modifying the engine (without the shader).

If you are in FPP camera mode, dim3CameraPosition should be the same as the player position. The bigger problem (and one of several reasons that shaders aren't very useful for map segments in dim3) is that the engine draws all shader segments as opaque (the alpha component is ignored). It's impossible to make an opaque water segment look good.

cyst Wrote:

mafoo Wrote:You could write a vertex shader - but you would need to modify the engine to relay the player position etc, and you could do it in the same amount of work by just modifying the engine (without the shader).

If you are in FPP camera mode, dim3CameraPosition should be the same as the player position. The bigger problem (and one of several reasons that shaders aren't very useful for map segments in dim3) is that the engine draws all shader segments as opaque (the alpha component is ignored). It's impossible to make an opaque water segment look good.

Remind me after the mesh stuff gets farther, I can fix this, I just need to give you the ability to flip on the blending on and off, depending on the shader. It's much, much faster to draw and sort non-transparents, so I'll probably make it an option.

[>] Brian