Water tech *spawn

Yeah, you're right. Though, I'd add in here that there are 2 types of 2D rippling effects:

1. Ones which go circular, waves that go out without intersecting each other and keeps no record of speed and dispersion. e.g. Bioshock,
far cry
Example 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3wSlqQXITU
Example 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmsTAmpsK-c

Crysis(though crysis has fluid buoyancy, upthrust physics but no interactive wave generation).
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfmHcCa7Lk8&feature=related



2. Ones that are generated mathematically, they intersect and crossover, generated properly and kept record of dispersion, and in better cases speeds as well. e.g.
MGS4(A mixture here, at least 1 place where there is 3D water. Though most of else is amazingly done mathematical waves that transect, bisect and all)
Glitch video, see near the end, amazing wave generation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF_JsX3ir1A

Uncharted(Mixture here as well, but not with pure 3D, instead some volumetric shaders and 2D rippling. That gives you 2.5D ripples that give out realistic hightmap variation illusion as well. Anyhow, best mathematical 2D rippling, full record of dispersion seems to be kept as well as proper difference between smaller and larger water-bodies difference.)
Overall lookout below, first appearance is small water-body in submarine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9l1kmD8FHg

Gears2(all water ripples in gears2 are seemingly done around shallow water-body model, ripples are generated and end real fast i.e., exhibits tight surface tension, more-so, they never bounce back from other collisions, which is strange.)
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqoB6_Wei8&feature=related

 

COD: World at war too had volumetric water with waves & ripples that intersect & collide. MW2 was a huge step back in this area.

Although when done on large scale in specific conditions it can look downright silly (like a mini tsunami, as in video below) , but the water physics is still nice especially for a 60FPS console game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JioUYcN9hAw

 

mmm... actually no, technicality-wise the answer is seriously a NO.
I totally love Bioshock's water, its pretty, actually PRETTY pretty
But its like totally flat and very, very past-gen-ish!

Bioshock 1 had amazing water right from the offset, it totally set the mood, was pretty heavy to look at and it was the best usage of UE3.0 ever. Still it was a basic flat shader effect and nothing mathematical about it. Worse thing about it is that it didn't even have interactivity... Imean, not even 2D realistic fluid ripples

Bioshock 2 has improved over its predecessor's flatness of water, by spreading sprites over it to represent the foam generated. Still its as plain and simply pretty-only case with no volume to the fluid whatsoever. Its as flat and unconvincing as the first one's. The lack of even basic interactivity is also very vivid.

Overall, its UE3.0's shortcoming that it can not do volumetric water. A very basic, 2D ripples based, surface-only interactivity water plugin was created for gears2 only. It was entirely based around small water-body algorithms(waves diminishing abruptly, no environmental collision for dispersing waves etc.).
Do you know why?
Well, basically due to "Gemini"... the software threading system that can only utilize two cpu cores at a time, and its the heart of UE3.0 While special "gears2-only" code for interactive water surfaces does seem to be utilizing the 3rd xbox360 core and was totally rendered unportable to PC initially due to handicapped software preferences. Now, Epic games is frantically after multi-cores supportive features and calling it UE4.0, which will give freedom of working with cpus alongside gpus for this versatile engine as well.

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Referentially speaking, 10 yrs old game Ico (on PS2) had more amazing '3D'-ish water with proper interactivity within its share of resources than what Bioshock has with its...

PS2's Ico (2001) videos below:
Ico water 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hNBHtZshYk
Ico water 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ioQ1Ul0pQ
Ico water 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQJBmVGFNbo

 

You know water being 2D doesn't mean it has to be bad or such or else Uncharted 1 and U2s 2D water with 2D ripple shader (rivers, ponds etc) could be stacked into that category to...

Time has obviously gone but that is horrible looking low polygon mesh water in an extremly limited scenario with simple reflections. Even for that time it looks about as the water in AvP from 2000 which was also 3D and interactive. Maybe even less detailed than AvPs water mesh. Nowdays games tend to have larger water areas that also needs to reflect surroundings and have believable surface and sub surface effects to mimic real water.

Anyway talking about old games anyone remember Outcast which had really good water shading with dynamic/proc 2D ripples like some modern games today? July 1999?

 

Hahaa' me like it
Its very interesting and funny alike. For my God, had water in real-life be like this, I'd stay as far away as I would from any giant sea creature. The water here gave me the creeps, its very disturbing in itself as well heh heh, It was like some shape-shifting Elder from the Cthulhu's realm . Some giant squid or jellyfish

Anyhow, its still more appreciatable than Far Cry or the likes, at least they are opting for real-life, thanks for the vid

 

UE 2.5 actually.

 

Mhhh, FFT is used in Crysis 1 already. There's even a CVar for it

e_water_ocean_fft

 

And just for the record, Warhead and Crysis Wars to which makes it 2 Crytek SP games and one standalone multiplayer game!

 

Damn!

 

Yes, I agree with you, still we have to consider that 2D rippling we see, is it mathematical or not... for that I brought some references elsewhere on the forum, see below:

There are 2 types of 2D ripples in games:

1. Ones which go circular, waves that go out without intersecting each other and keeps no record of speed and dispersion. e.g. Bioshock,
far cry
Example 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3wSlqQXITU
Example 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmsTAmpsK-c

Crysis(though crysis has fluid buoyancy, upthrust physics but no interactive wave generation).
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfmHc...eature=related


2. Ones that are generated mathematically, they intersect and crossover, generated properly and kept record of dispersion, and in better cases speeds as well. e.g.
MGS4(A mixture here, at least 1 place where there is 3D water. Though most of else is amazingly done mathematical waves that transect, bisect and all)
Glitch video, see near the end, amazing wave generation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF_JsX3ir1A

Uncharted(Mixture here as well, but not with pure 3D, instead some volumetric shaders and 2D rippling. That gives you 2.5D ripples that give out realistic hightmap variation illusion as well. Anyhow, best mathematical 2D rippling, full record of dispersion seems to be kept as well as proper difference between smaller and larger water-bodies difference.)
Overall lookout below, first appearance is small water-body in submarine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9l1kmD8FHg

Gears2(all water ripples in gears2 are seemingly done around shallow water-body model, ripples are generated and end real fast i.e., exhibits tight surface tension, more-so, they never bounce back from other collisions, which is strange.)
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqoB...eature=related

I just brought that up to say why even in today's games, with these much memory resources, they find doing interactive water threatening?... When Ico came, it was the Pentium-3 era, and PCs still had 5 times more hardware resources than PS2, so why even then they were not 5-times better in doing such kind of 3D calculations, you mentioned AvP doing similar stuff in 2000s as Ico, what kept i from doing better???
A great explanation here:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2000/04/ps2vspc.ars

Actually not procedural, or even mathematical per se, but those were damn nice water renderings in there. I remember boasting it to my friends on my Pentium-2. One thing I must say, as with any PC game is that what they promoted on the trailer disc, was not what released in the final product, anyways, it was amazing nonetheless.
See below, water comes at around mid-video, it was great for its times:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zieFJIB9mrs

 

Those just use spirte splashes though Crysis has mapped textures intersecting to make it look like "3D" ripples according to impact force. Of course not as good as shader modifying water surface.

Couldn't see MGS4 video but Uncharted ripples and water is pure 2D, your seeing an illusion which is the goal. Ripples are 2D, nothing more and just gives the illusion of being "3D" does the same type of ripples in Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and many more games. DIfference is resolution of ripple effect and detail.
Also that Uncharted video shows simplistic ripples that takes no consideration about water flow movement, angle, nothing except create an inverse 'v' ripple for movement or 'o' splash for impact. Impact splashes that have unatural development speed and ends quite abruptly. Just watch the flowing river at end of video and splashes. It also looks fairly low-res aswell as water res.

Absolutely nothing beyond standard for these type of ripple shaders. I suggest checking out more games you will be surprised how many already do stuff like this and many even really good.

They seem to move unaturally but so does the Uncharted ones. Guess it is a limitation in time or perfomance. Though IIRC Gears 2 water is 3D as in a tight deformable polygon mesh which is more costly on perfomance and perhaps a mater of balance.

Becouse water alone is not all that is rendered and then the question about how much water has to be rendered. And also 1999/2000 PC hardware was not 5 times faster. The real leap started IIRC 2001 with Geforce/Geforce2 series and T&L and other new tech.

If you say "5 times faster" then that article has little value in discussion becouse it is a mather of how rendering load is distributed, resolution etc. By 2000/2001 1024x768 was quite common res on PC. Obviously that will have impact and devs who target that res will try to customise their game rendering load around that resolution. Compare that to ICO which is what, 512×224p res with perfomance issues?

As said you cant judge system perfomance/capabilities based solely on one aspect/feature.

They are procedural and if you have played it you see how the ripples changes according to your movement. Similar to Uncharted ripples, 2D shading to give impression of being "3D" and according to your movement. Just floating creates 'o' rings and moving creates inverse 'v' in a trail. And PC games mostly looked like promoted bar the SSAA and sometime around 2003/2004 it in most cases presented final game or even worse than final.

Btw that pic of Outcast I posted is from final game if you have highest settings.

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And to keep it ontopic better water is something desirable for the future but not just surface but also under the water surface. Crysis is one game that paves the way but it can get better. Sure there are others with great undersea rendering. Also water drops as particles with physics to form water masses and ínteract with environment. Cryostasis makes great progress here but still quite some way to go.

Water particle drops with physics etc. The impressive is the engine and HW needs to render about 30000 particles with viscosity, repulsion calcs, complex physics collision detection with world + other particles and more.


Under water surface. Everything can get better especially the bubbles!

 

I recall the water in Kameo on 360 being impressive at the time. I can't seem to find a video showing it off though.

I can't believe there hasn't been a watercraft racing game this gen with how well they could make the water look. Something in the vein of Pure on water could be pretty sweet.

 

I would love to have 60fps back, actually.

All the other stuff is great, seriously, but when it animates at 60fps, it looks so much better. Somehow I think this just won't happen if enough people don't demand it. Any time there is a new doodad it gets enabled, and to the max. That's the real reason so many games are capped at 30, and struggle to even do that.

I'll never forget playing F.E.A.R. on the 360, yeah yeah, I had already gone through it on my PC, I just got into it all over again on the 360. A few years later and I'm seeing the videos everywhere for F.E.A.R. 2, and in the opening of one of them there was a lot of footage from F.E.A.R. 1. What struck me was how much better it looked than the actual F.E.A.R. game that I had played, I started it up again just to be sure I wasn't misremembering, but it was true. The video from the XBox Live Marketplace was running the footage at 60fps and the actual game was 30fps.

 

You forgot Halo 3. That is certainly the best water I've seen on consoles, and it is not just 2D ripples.
http://www.breakitdownblog.com/evolution-of-water-in-games-best-is-halo-3/

 

Not to drag this out (*hugs shifty*), but there is nothing special about that water effect. It's still the same old 2D plane water, just (I guess) with an XY displacement based on the gradient difference in height on the 2D grid. There is certainly no intersection or collision going on.

Pretty much all in game water boils down to the same 2D grid algorithm, where each point stores a height. Every frame, you take the average of the 4 height values around each pixel (left,right,above,below), take the difference, and subtract it from the current value.
Basically, it's a blur filter, but instead you are blurring the difference and adding it.

So, take a very simply 5x5 example (this is totally off the top of my head, it's not going be accurate):

Initial state, flat plane with a single high value to start a wave propagating (you often see this in games, where one vertex has a crazy high displacement to start the wave effect)

Code:

0  0  0  0  0
0  0  0  0  0 
0  0 16  0  0
0  0  0  0  0
0  0  0  0  0

after a single pass, it turns into:

Code:

0  0  0  0  0
0  0  4  0  0
0  4 -4  4  0
0  0  4  0  0
0  0  0  0  0

Pass 2:

Code:

0  0  1  0  0
0  2 -1  2  0
1 -1  4 -1  1
0  2 -1  2  0
0  0  1  0  0

Apply a damping factor, and repeat. You can see how the wave pattern emerges. It is exceptionally cheap, can easily be done on the GPU (or an SPU) and is very very fast. The only problem is it scales linearly with the number of vertices, which on a grid usually means N^2.

In the COD:WOW example, (to my eye) all they are doing is taking the difference on the XY planes of the grid, and using that as an offset. It's still a flat 2D plane.

So,

0 0 0
0 1 0
0 0 0

becomes an XY displacement of:

Code:

0, 0  0, 1  0, 0
1, 0  0, 0 -1, 0
0, 0  0,-1  0, 0

Very simple stuff really. Convincing, but hardly a revolution.

 

I was very impressed by GTA4 water effects, Just Cause 2 water sucked compared to it.

 

The console editions obviously didn't have it.

 

^^ To Nebula ^^

I read through all your post, its fairly convincing as it is but the difference in observation, study and thus a difference in opinion definitely exists which is a healthy thing to say the least... so I'd point out a few things here:

1. The Arstechnica article link that I posted above was to give a very impressive outlook they gave through it around the two conflicting hardware solutions. A memorable extract from the article was:

PCs = Small pipes and large buckets
while,
Consoles= Large pipes and small buckets

Now that is a very defining analogy the article gave over the two hardware types, so what is happening is that With all the resources at hand,
-PCs will always be bottle-necked in processing department due to small/weak information relay between its various components(smaller pipes, huge memories),
and on the other hand,
-Consoles with as much superior CPUs as can be, will always be bottle-necked by the memory-issues(large pipes, smal/weak buckets)
Ofcourse, the design structure needs o be changed on both, but considering how much same things(RAM, VRAM, Disc-Speed etc.) are utilized, we see a console much more optimized(in turn-around) to do a certain gaming application. The same hardware that ran ICO in 2001, also ran fur-shaders in Soul-Calibur 3 in 2007, or that it displayed all those feats like Primal, Ghosthunter(full 3D wter, cloth, rope physics, voumetric lights etc.), gow1-2, Colossus, Metal-Gears or GT4 etc. being the same fixed hardware of 2k.
For example, a Pentium-III of 2000 would, under no circumstances be able to run 2005's Devil May Cry 3 even at a 5fps, actually a P4 with a good 2004 gpu might even give it a stuttering try, but one thing is certain, it will have a better resolution(bigger buckets of PCs). So where PCs are stuck with processes, consoles have memory issues. Though, when comparing the result output in terms of processing, consoles do pack a punch, for with console-level resources, PCs would simply choke.

2. 2nd thing is gears2 water, that you said is actually 3D with a mesh involved. This I have to say I can't agree, first due to an observational reason, but we'll get it stay aside... secondly that its what Epic theirselves told, its an additional thing to basic UE3.0, called "Interactive fluid surfaces". That is plain old 2D surface and not the "volume" interaction like in Resistnce-2. Its a plain texture effect, very much like Uncharted, though uncharted boasts collisions as well(pool scene etc.). Moreover, this made-for-gears2 surface interaction thing was also give out to a 2D XBL swimming title where dev-interview explains how fluids behaviour seems changed since they incorporated gears 2 tech.

3. Thirdly, its still about Outcast, I am totally sold to its world though I still don't think the 2D water ripples were procedural. I remember playing it so much and loving the water but the ripples were entirely circular, no matter in what direction you swim. They never did a 'V' to anywhere. Can you please give me a video link showing the V water movement?
Also, it would be a great favour if you can tell me where I can download that nostalgiac beauty