Advanced Water Rendering

[Stuart Walpole]

• Water patches would be nice for alpha but not necessary

• Enhanced shoreline/reflection/wave effects

• Foam decals around shorelines

• Foam around entities (rocks, ships, etc.)

• Entity splash particles/effects - think of an army crossing a river or projectiles landing in the water

• "Wakes" for moving ships?

• Optimization of water rendering.

• Lower levels of water settings for older graphics cards.

• Compression of water normal maps (if possible without a big loss of quality).

[Matei]

Reflections, refractions and per-pixel lighting have been added. Missing things include:

• Foam decals around rocks/ships/shorelines.

• Optimization of water rendering.

• Lower levels of water settings for older graphics cards.

• Compression of water normal maps (if possible without a big loss of quality).

[(none)]

Milestone Environment Demo deleted

[historic_bruno]

#1572 is related

[wraitii]

Point 5 has been dealt with.

[historic_bruno]

We don't have foam around entities AFAIK, so I've added that as a separate item, and expanded the list slightly to include splashes.

[wraitii]

In 14514:

Substantial speed-up of the foam generation code.
Remove waves for now as they were unsatisfactory.
Removes "shininess" as a water parameter as it was basically useless.
Add a button in Atlas to recompute water parameters so you can now see fog in Atlas.

Fixes #1743, #1803 (invalid)
Refs #1875, #2114, #48.

[wraitii]

In 15473:

Change the water texture to a new, bigger one, created in Blender (thanks to Enrique). Change settings so that they are more logical, yet allow reverting back to an even lower quality setting. Add a WIP high setting (with foam) which isn't finished yet.
Change the shader itself so that the effects look nicer and are more consistent across settings.
Rework the water mesh generation (simpler system). Fix a few issues.

May work oddly with Atlas since I haven't been able to compile yet.

Refs #1875 (maybe fix), Fixes #2077 (I'll assume it does), Fixes #2114 (assumption again), refs #48.

[wraitii]

In 15484:

Further WIP water improvements. Add 3 different textures for different looks. Update some oasis maps for that. Streamline water settings (some removed, some added). Update Atlas for those (needs to be tested). Fix an issue with HQ water effects.

Please report any issue and/or crash. Those will get fixed in commits to come. Refs #48.

[wraitii]

In 15492:

Fix "Wind Angle" parameter not working properly. Add a precomputed "wind strength" variable so that waves look smaller behind islands. Some tweaks. Refs #48 as usual.