Water ?

[stopub]

Hi, i just saw this video 

 

we can see how water can run on Unigine 2.3, i read somewhere that Dual Universe is running on Unigine too so is it possible to have this beautiful water on Dual Universe ?

[yamamushi]

Unfortunately, it most likely will not look as badass as the water you see on Unigine's demo videos. 

 

They want to do voxel water, but water is an incredibly difficult thing to do right in a game like Dual Universe. In the pre-alpha, water is just a layer of the ground at a certain level, with no effects on the players. They're not going to neglect water though, it's just going to take some time before we see it in game.

[Hades]

I imagine getting water to work so nice in a seamless MMO is crazy difficult.  I imagine it eventually becomes a question of whether you want fancy water, or crashing because 100 people are on screen near a lake.

 

I'm not a game dev though, so I guess I really wouldn't know

[Lethys]

it'll need time to do it right in a MMO and maybe we get some nice and cool water later but don't expect it to be like that demo

[Shockeray]

I would have thought that they would not have messed with water since it can lead to some odd things in games where you can mine. For example, if I am digging up from some place 2km down and come up under a lake, what happens? If the water is static, then you could completely dig out around a pond and have a punch of floating water, which would be odd imo.

[war]

They will likely have something similar to how Minecraft does water ... 
simple physics applied to a large mesh that represents the volume that they can distort over time.

With modern GPU tech, this kind of thing isn't overly taxing and each client could handle this on their own and at various detail / quality levels based on local setting.

[Haunty]

I don't know anything about it, but I was thinking the least they could do is have static water voxels and make the terrain bordering the water uneditable or have no effect on the water when edited. But I assume they'd rather do something more interesting if they can. Whatever it is I'm looking forward to seeing it.

[NanoDot]

Having "great looking" water is not the issue, Archeage does an excellent job in that regard, for instance.

 

But in Archeage you cannot deform the terrain, and you can't randomly build structures underwater.

 

To make the water in DU behave "believably", it needs to be able to flow. If you dig a tunnel that emerges into the bottom of a lake, the tunnel should be flooded and the lake surface should drop accordingly. Digging a channel that opens-up into a body of water should fill that channel with water, while draining away the main body, etc. 

 

Terrain voxels are static, and they already lead to some strange outcomes, such as the potential to have "floating mountains" when the base voxels are excavated.

 

I'd imagine it would be very difficult to assign dynamic properties to the massive amount of voxels in an ocean or lake, and to make those voxels obey the laws of fluid physics.

[Shockeray]

On 9/15/2017 at 10:36 AM, NanoDot said:

I'd imagine it would be very difficult to assign dynamic properties to the massive amount of voxels in an ocean or lake, and to make those voxels obey the laws of fluid physics.

Yes, I don't think that it could ever be handled in the same way it is in Minecraft or Terraria. If have ever been around when massive lake drainages occur, you know the kind of processing it takes. So unless they have some kind of clever way to calculate and fill below-water-level spaces, I doubt that it will be dynamic water.

[Celestialdeath99]

18 hours ago, Hades said:

I imagine getting water to work so nice in a seamless MMO is crazy difficult.  I imagine it eventually becomes a question of whether you want fancy water, or crashing because 100 people are on screen near a lake.

 

I'm not a game dev though, so I guess I really wouldn't know

As Hades pointed out along with others, getting water to function in a equal manner to everyone in a MMO is a relatively large task, and something that is very seldom able to be completed successfully. If you have fancy looking water like that and are required to load it to many players in a coordinated fashion as would be needed in the case of Dual Universe due to the amount of freedom the voxel technology provides, you would end up with massive amounts of resources being used up for a fairly small portion of the game. It would be better to focus on the properties of the water like the physics and motion versus the looks as much. After all, I would rather be challenged by building constructs that have to deal with water using physics that water actually uses instead of just looking at something pretty that does not do much.

 

That is just my personal opinion though.

[stopub]

Just Saw this video, i think you need to get this guy on your dev team ^^

[Shynras]

[Stoat]

1 hour ago, Shynras said:

 

 

That water looks really nice imo!

[Megaddd]

1 hour ago, Shynras said:

Ooh, what happens when you tried walking into/under it?

[Fitorion]

MMO's always take a hit to graphics as compared to single player games.  That said they're definitely going to do the best they can.

[Shynras]

14 hours ago, Megaddd said:

Ooh, what happens when you tried walking into/under it?

that pic is from twitter, so i can't answer that ( likely you just go through , maybe slowed). Btw it's a placeholder, as yamamushi said the water will likely be made out of voxels, now it's just a mesh.

[Magz]

still looks good what they have visually though so far

[Chuckinator]

22 hours ago, Megaddd said:

Ooh, what happens when you tried walking into/under it?

Couldn't try this because it was in god mode sorry , but when you dig you can find water sources , and if you dig near lakes / seas the water fill just like in minecraft

[Shockeray]

8 minutes ago, Lenux said:

Couldn't try this because it was in god mode sorry , but when you dig you can find water sources , and if you dig near lakes / seas the water fill just like in minecraft

That's actually pretty surprising, I had assumed that they weren't even going to mess with water being dynamic at all. Did the water actually fill in to lever or just "flow" like in Minecraft when you have a single water source?

[Chuckinator]

1 minute ago, Shockeray said:

That's actually pretty surprising, I had assumed that they weren't even going to mess with water being dynamic at all. Did the water actually fill in to lever or just "flow" like in Minecraft when you have a single water source?

If i remember it does fill like minecraft 

[Groogy]

Proper fluid dynamics would be cool but I am surprised they are even just going with something simple like Minecraft style water. That's quite impressive especially considering for a pre-alpha.

[Sh4d0ws]

As a developer, I can say with reasonable certainty that they will probably not do realistic water in their game (at least not from the start, at any rate). Large bodies of water moving across a server with thousands of people would be a nightmare to develop and have function properly. Not to mention multiple planets, voxel collision, tunnels, etc. Based on the comments it seems they are possibly planning a more "minecraft" style of flowing water which I think is reasonable.

 

However I could be wrong, after all DU is an ambitious project and maybe they will attempt full fluid dynamics at some point. Although I would wager its not high on their priorities.

[LurkNautili]

There are some things they could investigate that might work for their application, though I don't think it'll be high on their list of priorities.

 

E.g. a cellular automaton based sim could be fairly realistic (there are some neat examples out there) and it's on the lighter end of the spectrum in terms of computational overhead. You can obviously forget navier-stokes, euler, boltzmann and even things like SPH. The only tech I see having a snowballs chance of making the cut is one based on CAs. Then again, NQ has surprised in the past, like for instance I hadn't heard about dual contouring before I saw their kickstarter video, and that technology is 15 years old -- so who knows...

 

They're talented and knowledgeable engineers, and I have confidence in their ability to overcome technical challenges. I'm far more worried when it comes to some aspects of their game design philosophy, but that's off-topic...