Don’t get me wrong in the sense that my answer might sound not exactly the answer you wanted or sounded rude in any sort. I for once was in the same spot as you, wanting to understand this asset the first time I put my eyes on it, and I expended a lot of time doing this, basically because when a new engine release was launched and something changed in the engine that make the code break I was not able to use it anymore, therefore I had to study it deeply. That is a perspective for one with at least some C++ knowledge. This project was given by @DotCam for free in 2014 and it received a lot of contributions along the way from different persons. Now DotCam is MIA for some reason and we know he was not in good health for quite some time, then I thought at first since the original thread was receiving a lot of questions and nobody to answer, that one way for me to contribute to it was giving answers or directions, which I think I quite achieved by creating a lot of videos explaining how to do things with the asset as you can see in this Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis…DFqSmCqo5bo5qm.
I myself was always willing to create an ocean asset since the beginning and I am in continuous research for this and I am using the amount of questioning and difficulties people have with this FREE project to enhance my own make it more easy to use, so I think the balance between what I want to receive from this project and what I can give is quite ok by now. I think that people want to know where the heck of the knowledge to come to build an asset like this come from, so there will go:
Gerstner Waves: https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems/gpugems_ch01.html
Tessendorf FFT Waves : https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~jtessen/papers_files/coursenotes2004.pdf
So, if you take your time to read those papers and check the code you will find that those formulas are used in this project (Gerstner ones), my project will use the FFT one, and besides the knowledge is written using math, this knowledge needs to be converted to the game engine of choice, our case is UE4 translated into material (using a graph) and sometimes shaders (which uses a similar C++ notation). This FREE project uses C++ to generate the Infinite Ocean System, the Physical Water Surface uses same approach for Infinite Ocean System but using blueprints instead of C++. It is possible after some work to make the Physical Water Surface to look exactly as this FREE project, but needs that the person is willing to study and understand both assets if they want something customized.
I hope this clarifies the why things are like this.