I’m looking for a realistic infinite ocean (translucency, waves, no visible tiling at a distance). I’d like to use the new water system in 4.26, of course, but I’ve run into bugs preventing that.
Any suggestions for a stable, attractive, high-quality implementation would be appreciated. Ideally free, since I’m hoping (assuming) the built-in water system will be fixed “soon.”
Make your own.
a thousand times better than whatever epic comes up with.
The challenging parts are shorelines/shorewaves and physics if you need it.
At a base level, physics is just fake.
You make a CPP function that returns the same result as the wave function of the material, and you can power whatever with it. You are never reading height from the material (which would be nice but its near impossible due to the time it takes to sample a pixel).
The shoreline thing has near endless solutions. None of them right because the gastner (or any type of) waves go in one direction, which isn’t necessarily the beach direction.
As far as “endless”, why?
just make it “end” and use a really large plane to fake the “neverending”.
i
f you need it to actually never end you have many other project widr concerns like physics and floating point precision. So dump that idea and just teleport the player pacman style when he reaches a certain distance. If you do it right you can even prevent them noticing the teleport (the waves will tile so you just need to pick the right spot).
The new singlewaterlayer prevents a few bugs when you make the material, so there isn’t much “know how to bypass this bug” knowledge needed anymore.
Also the material and the way it works can render way better than using transparency powered alternatives.
However let’s keep in mind that in the end the “cap” on how good it can look vs how performant it is doesn’t change.
The better you get it to look the lower your performance.
I’m certainly open to making my own if I have to – was just hoping to avoid reinventing the wheel. Precise physics isn’t important. This is just a placeholder until Epic fixes the built-in water system.
The Starter Content’s Ocean material could be made to work; it’s just ugly as sin, and isn’t translucent or swimmable.
When I said “infinite,” I didn’t mean literally neverending; I just need it to be able to cover my entire 16 x 16 km tiled map (2k x 2k px) without killing performance.