I was thinking about trying something like this, so I searched the forum on it. In the thread about Liquid Shaders, a couple of people thought it would be possible to create a shader for reflections. I know that reflection mapping may be coming, but I am just interested in anyway I could write a shader like that. (I suck writing shaders.)
Shaders are definitely something that needs work when it comes to Dim3; reflective shaders are something many of us would like to see done, I myself am having much the same problem as you. Perhaps someday Brian will rework it so that Shader implementation is not so difficult....
Reflections in shaders aren't real reflections as shaders don't have access to the backbuffer or any other rendering data. Real reflections need to be done first in the engine itself, and it's something that I'll eventually do.
My first priority is getting the engine back together after the major mesh change, then networking, then I'll try to get back to things like this.
So, it's not far off, but it's not soon, either
[>] Brian
But, is it possible to write a shader like that now? I don't care if it isn't real reflections, I just want the water in my outdoor maps to look totally kick ass whether its reflecting right or not. :D
Brian said it was possible––he'll eventually do it. It's not really important. Just use a texture.
adobemedia Wrote:But, is it possible to write a shader like that now? I don't care if it isn't real reflections, I just want the water in my outdoor maps to look totally kick ass whether its reflecting right or not. :D
It'd be hard -- give me a little bit of time -- I'll thinking this over, I just have to get some more important things done first.
[>] Brian
Right! Don't worry about this. *pushes adobemedia down* Hehe, it's not as important as other stuff!!!!!
The trick to good water is not necessarily reflection; what you need is an animating caustic texture on the bottom of your pool.
HD: Hey! I didn't think of that. That would look really good.
I did. The screenshots with my ship have it. You should try the JHLabs Java Image Editor. It has a filter to do just that.