Best water rendering effects *spawn

[Liandry]

Why do I sometimes feel like I was the only person who noticed the original FEAR's impressive 3D water tech used in a few specific places?

No you not only one. I just forgot it.
I also noticed 3D water in Battefield Hardline on Xbox 360. I haven't link to video, but if someone can find one, please post it here.

 

[Grall]

Wading in a pool of mercury is probably bad for health. Maybe.

You would have difficulty wading in a pool of mercury unless it was little more than ankle-deep, because mercury is incredibly heavy and you would thus have difficulty poking your feet through the surface of it. Steel easily floats in mercury, with about 40% of a lump of steel sticking up above the surface... Anyway, metallic mercury isn't particularly dangerous; the body doesn't really absorb it IIRC. Certain organic mercury compounds on the other hand... Quite lethal!

 

[London Geezer]

Has anyone here played Unravel? I think it has the best water effects by far. It's a 2.5D scroller so it's probably easier, but damn that's great water.

 

[jlippo]

Resistance 2 had quite nice rendering tech for it's water which was used pretty much everywhere in the game from small puddles to the ocean.

 

[milk]

Resistance 2 had quite nice rendering tech for it's water which was used pretty much everywhere in the game from small puddles to the ocean.

And disapointingly was absent from almost all insomniac later games...

 

[nightshade]

And disapointingly was absent from almost all insomniac later games...

It was used in R&C: ACiT.
The water uses FFT so has some nice deformation, although it looked ridiculous in Resistance 2 because it made it look like jelly. It looked fine in ACiT.
It lacked any reflective properties entirely.

Still, water in later Insomniac games like Sunset Overdrive and Ratchet & Clank 2016 are disappointing even by last gen standards.

 

[milk]

It was used in R&C: ACiT.

That one was the "almost" part.

 

[Gitaroo]

should ask them what happen to it. The water tech fail in very large wave though, I think it doesn't scale properly, looks like a massive block.

 

[Davros]

Got another set, this time from Halo 2 Vista/PC

could you do me a quick favour
go into keybinds and see if you can rebind the "A" key (strafe left) with the "Q" key and the "D" key (strafe right) with the "E" key

 

[hrdcr_plyr]

Uncharted's 4 water is the best water I've ever seen in a videogame, period. Naughty Gods always go beyond anything one could think it's possible, and that's why I love hardcore videogames

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Depends which water you're looking at. In the intro, the sea Nate is in and its interaction with him is weak.

 

[rockaman]

I probably could've got a better image, but it's hard when tens and hundreds of headless bomb guys are chasing you

It probably looks good here, but much better in motion too. This is probably the worst image I took of the game, but it still looks pretty good. I didn't find too many other spots with water unless I just missed screencapping them so far. This next one is not actually water, but it's a good example of how robust the reflections are within the engine, even very nicely reflecting off-screen environment and sky.

Serious Sam 3 is really good at having high fidelity and IQ even at very large distance which is very nice looking all over the game. Really well done custom engine that lets them have huge levels with enemies and environments at seemingly all ranges, and even very nice high resolution shadows all over the scene at almost all distances too.

could you do me a quick favour
go into keybinds and see if you can rebind the "A" key (strafe left) with the "Q" key and the "D" key (strafe right) with the "E" key

Yep you can, just have to dive a bit into the menus, first by going into your player profile, and then just keep clicking through to keyboard/mouse. There's some presets, but also the option to customize completely.

Only niggle is you have to first unbind what Q and E (weapon swap/dual wield and "use" I think) are currently set to before you can rebind them, which is a bit annoying. But the KB/M controls are fully customizable

There's a lot less customization available for the Xinput natively, only presets are available. But with something like DS4Windows you can customize those controls outside the game which is nice. I do the same thing for RE4 Steam which has awful, awful preset controls.... lol.

There are supposedly also some mods/hacks to turn off the aim assist, which is really strong in H2Vista while using Xinput, haven't tried them yet though. No option in-game to disable it... lol. The Halo 2 Cartographer thing also fixes some of the mouse aiming stuff apparently to make it feel more like a proper PC shooting, more smooth like Source games aiming.

Uncharted's 4 water is the best water I've ever seen in a videogame, period. Naughty Gods always go beyond anything one could think it's possible, and that's why I love hardcore videogames

I am not sure what it means hardcore videogames. Uncharted never struck me as too intense or hardcore

But it certainly has extremely high production values!

Finally got to some water in Serious Sam TFE HD. It's a pretty nice effect, similar to the Halo 2 one in style, less intense waviness maybe, but similar light gray and otherwise colourless shader effect.

 

[rockaman]

Probably could've captured these at 4K since I had rendering resolution that high... but oh well

Some Twilight Princess water (GameCube).

Really nice effect, can really see all of its detail at high resolution. The effect in the Wii and WiiU version is the same I think.

 

[rockaman]

Some more Twilight Princess. The Dolphin emulator really lets you highly customize effects through little code hacks which is very neat. Also the very high amount of post-processing effects you can add with this Ishiiruka build, it's a bit of a fetish I guess to play with so many settings

So this is where I am right now with customizing effects.... found a code to enable widescreen for the GC version, disabled the original low-quality bloom and replaced it with a higher quality post-processing version to make it look nicer but retain the same lighting style, added some SSAO to material near the camera, took away the fog, added some moderate texture sharpening and minor additional texture filtering, I think those are all of it. This is what it looks like, and with lots of water

But anyway, I came to a conclusion it is a very amazing game, and also a very amazing game with lots of nice water!

The texture quality is far behind what is available in the WiiU version of Twilight Princess, and that version's bloom is more accurate and stylized closer to the original especially in high bloom scenes, but other than that I think I achieved a very nice balance of original GameCube art with modern visual effects

If it wasn't obvious I do love me some 6th generation water shaders

 

[Clukos]

Got some captures from the underwater level in Uncharted 4

I like how the deeper you go the more claustrophobic it gets, nice sense of depth

 

[rockaman]

I need to take some pictures/video of Maximo for PS2. It has excellent water, some of the best wave/water surface I can remember on PS2. Really nice, also reacts beautifully to the character movement.

 

[milk]

But does it taste like real water? I've been licking my screen for years and it's always tasted like dusty plastic for years.

 

[rockaman]

But does it taste like real water? I've been licking my screen for years and it's always tasted like dusty plastic for years.

Have you ever licked a CRT?

I actually tried it once... haha. It was quite the sensation! Lots of static!

 

[milk]

But water has no static!

 

[eloic]

I need to take some pictures/video of Maximo for PS2. It has excellent water, some of the best wave/water surface I can remember on PS2. Really nice, also reacts beautifully to the character movement.

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