Water in the Ocean Sea

[modernknight1]

OK, so I have been playing New Horizons a bunch this week and am just loving it. I just completed the Hawk quest. I hadn't played that since like 2005. It's sooo much better than the stock game it's unbelieveable! With the ENB graphics the game is far improved and looks just as good as COAS.

I had forgotten just how nice the swells are in POTC. Pieter has often commented on how much better and more realistic the color is in POTC and I have to agree. Luke159, Craiggo and myself have played with the water and weather effects and lightening the color for a couple years. It is better than the vanilla, but we have still never been able to get the color right or achieve swells. COAS has a better effect for clear water I think in calm places, and the storms are better, but that's the only things with respect to water it does better. The foam effects are also better in POTC and the waves on the shorelines and ports are better also.

So here's what I'm wondering. Pirate KK reported that he just can't seem to get the newer engine to compile properly as well as other problems. If that's the impass and we are not going to overcome it, then lets keep the older POTC engine. I have been doing some experiments. I took the POTC/New Horizons engine file and replaced the one in GOF with it. Guess what? It runs fine with it. I was surprised.

So now, if I wanted to try to import POTC's water into my version of COAS using the POTC engine, which dll files, gm files, weather files, etc, do I need to snag to see if I can make it work? Any ideas?

Thanks!

MK

 

[Hylie Pistof]

You want to move backwards? Would it be possible for the POTC dll, gms, and such to work with GOF? I don't know where that stuff is, but someone who does will be along.

Here are some links to threads about POTC water. http://forum.pirates...otc-sea-colour/


http://forum.piratesahoy.net/index.php/topic/17627-water-issue/

 

[Armada]

Interesting comments, MK. I didn't realise we'd done such a comparatively good job on the water improvements for POTC. :nk
The colour was only recently improved, after some experimenting by another member and myself. The details are in the first thread Hylie mentioned.
The final result so far is that the water now has a fixed colour, which only appears to change because of the sky's colour and brightness, which is far more realistic than before.

Unfortunately, I'm no expert on which dll files to use. As for resource files, there are some files related to the foam effects in the 'RESOURCE/foam' folder, but they appear to be location-specific.
You might need some of the texture files from RESOURCE/Textures/WEATHER/SEA, depending on what you have in COAS. Not sure what else you might need, though...

 

[Jan Marten]

There's a 2 way. A rewrite of the files in modules (*. Sha) and a correction of the textures. I'm almost done so. As always, I have no time to test everything.

 

[Jan Marten]

This proposal comes from a Russian programmer, and the idea has been tried yet.
In the shader file, the waves - size - type and the reflection of the sun produces.

modules/techniques/weather/sea/Sea2.sha

old
PixelShader ps_Sea3
{
asm
{
ps.1.1

tex t0
texbem t1, t0

tex t2
texbem t3, t2

mad r0.xyz, v0, t1, v1
add r0.xyz, r0, t3
mov r0.w, v0.w
}
}


new
PixelShader ps_Sea3
{
asm
{
ps.1.1

tex t1

mad r0.xyz, v0, t1, v1
mov r0.w, v0.w
}
}

I've even made ​​some graphical edits alleding to support these effects.

Here are a couple of effects resulting from the evacuation.
+ Color no longer bright yellow rays of the sun
+ Bow waves of ships
+ Changes in the illumination by the sun
+ Spray from the boats
+ Rainbows appear differently on
+ waves
+ At night when light conditions

I could not check everything yet because I'm still working on it.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

CoAS works with the PotC ENGINE.exe???
I do remember we tried swip-swapping files between AoP and PotC back in the days, but nothing worked properly.
Even just swapping sea.dll files and the like wouldn't work.

I'm pretty sure the PotC engine.exe file has nothing to do with the water. The following files might:
MODULES\sea.dll
RESOURCE\Textures\WEATHER\SEA

However, the shape of the waves and the colour of the sea are changed through code:
PROGRAM\Weather
I'm pretty sure you can't just swap out those files, but you might be able to adapt our PotC code changes to apply to CoAS too.
Just find the applicable lines in the .c files and try to work those into the CoAS PROGRAM folder instead.

Actually, I don't think I ever called the look in PotC truly realistic; it's not, but I do very much like it anyway.
To me, it seems more like a very appealing stylized look, whereas CoAS tries to be more realistic,
fails, but doesn't look appealing in a stylized way to me either.

Things have improved in PotC further with Armada's new colours though, of course.
Though I still do find the storms to look a bit less epic than they used to.

 

[Armada]

Things have improved in PotC further with Armada's new colours though, of course.
Though I still do find the storms to look a bit less epic than they used to.

I reckon that's mostly down to the waves, to be honest.
Look at Jan Marten's screenshots above; the storm there looks much more chaotic than a PotC storm, yet the sea is roughly the same realistic colour.
Although we surely can't get the same wave effects in PotC, we could at least get something similar, right?

 

[Jan Marten]

I think that the color of the water to make real POTC is feasible. The movements of the water I can not say anything because I do not busy with POTC.
The darkening of the water is at the textures.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

The lack of wave action is a big weakness in GOF and if the POTC values can be added there it would make a huge difference. Adding better color would really help too.

The POTC storms are too light with too much visibility, plus the waves are big shiny rollers with no wind blown peaks. These values can be changed?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

PotC storm waves before were dark and they definitely SHOULD still have white caps.
The wave system sines can be changed through code in PotC at least.

 

[Jan Marten]

It is my opinion possible of AOP2 / GOF mod for PotC transfer. The engine plays a minor role.
I've seen the scripts. It must be re-written scripts, and above all the calls to be corrected scripts.
That's a big job and very very time consuming.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

POTC storms have deteriorated badly What would it take to bring them up to GOF standards with pointed peaks?

These two screenies show what has happened. One is a build 13 storm. If you look closely you can see the raging bull figurehead which means that is the biggest ship in the game.

The other is Beta 2.1. That is lightning in the background.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Note that the Build 14 Beta 2.1 storm sea colour is intentional by Armada. The sea colour in storms is now the same as without storms; originally the storms were deliberately darker.

 

[Armada]

POTC storms have deteriorated badly What would it take to bring them up to GOF standards with pointed peaks?

A bit of code tweaking in the right places is all we should need to do. We just need to know which files to edit, and then it's trial and error all the way 'till we get some decent results.

Note that the Build 14 Beta 2.1 storm sea colour is intentional by Armada. The sea colour in storms is now the same as without storms; originally the storms were deliberately darker.

I think part of the problem we have now is the brighter sky colour.
My adjustments to the sea ensure only the sky colour affects how the sea looks, so if we darken the stormy skies some more, we get back the darker (but this time realistic) sea.
Simple enough solution, right?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Sounds fair enough to me.

 

[modernknight1]

Thanks for the info. I am going to start experimenting with the scripts and changing out files in little increments to see what happens.

MK

 

[modernknight1]

So for those that haven't seen the vid I posted on my work in this area, here it is again:

Now here is my latest in the current experimentation. I am also importing some of the New Horizon's skies as part of this work. Tell me what you think. MK

 

[Post Captain]

The shapes of the waves almost look real. whatever you're doing, it seems to be working.

 

[modernknight1]

Thanks Post Capt. It's almost where I want it. On the floating islands....I think I may leave them that way. The game looks so much cleaner with less fog, that the distant islands hovering is a minimal distraction. I'm still playing with the fog and storm settings.

When I finish I will release this into a mini mod useable with any version of COAS. This way folks that don't want Eras can still enjoy the better waves. I really like the coloring in ports now too. It looks like the Caribbean now. I am still trying to figure out how to get the water to swell in port like in POTC.

MK

 

[modernknight1]

Here's the next installment. I think it is a bit too clear, but I am getting close to exactly where I want it. MK

Also look at this compilation to see my overall progress in testing: