PlayWay Water - high quality water system

Thanks, looking forward to it

 

The tropical island demo looks very cool. However, when you go very high, you can see the edge of the ocean very clearly. Can this be scaled up the ocean is visible all the way to the horizon at 10 km height, with an appropriate LOD?

 

That's just camera's clip plane. I've updated this demo to account for a greater sight range after I've read your previous post. I will publish it along with the water update on the Asset Store, but I can PM it to you earlier.

 

@zuzzu:

I've been searching for a definitive water asset for quite some time, and I must say, I am beyond impressed with PlayWay Water! It appears in many ways to be in a class of its own.

While I can agree with others' comments that the price is high, at least compared to other assets on the market, I suspect the price is justified and worth the investment.

I only have a few questions standing in the way of my purchase.

1. Rivers. I've read over the threads, and am still not entirely certain whether or not this is a planned feature, and if so, what sort of timeframe would be expected.
2. Caustics. I presume this will apply both above water and below? Also, where does this lay on your roadmap?
3. Pools. Can this also be used to realistically emulate relatively stagnant water?
4. Separate water-systems. Can this simulate more than one water system in the same scene (eg: an ocean, a pond, and a pool).

Thank you in advance for your response, and for all that you have already done!
- S.

 

Yes, it's planned feature, but for now I'm focusing on some other things, sorry. There are many AAA games with rivers, but without flow maps support like Skyrim. If your river is straight enough, it should be fine even right now.

That's one of the features I'm focusing on right now It will be visible both above and below water and will be available this year.

I've tested that for you. Looks good:

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It's possible, but some optimizations are still in progress for such use case. You should merge smaller water bodies sharing the same water profile into one mesh. I may automate that in the future.

 

Just bought it! Didn't notice it up until now.

Let me know when you get a demo up. I'm finishing a huge refactor that separates my code from Unity's, touching up a few voxel algorithms, and will integrate it afterwards.

 

@zuzzu:

Thank you for the response! I've purchased your asset.

Upon testing it in Unity, I immediately stumbled upon an issue. WaterCamera.cs throws a large number of errors, mostly "Invalid AABB" errors and "IsFinite(outDistanceForSort)" and "IsFinite(outDistanceAlongView)" errors when entering play mode when Wind Speed is set to a value under 5.

This error occurs with the supplied profiles, only modifying the Wind Speed.

I tried to track down the exact value, but it seems to vary.

- S.

 

It is fixed in 1.1. It was in production for a month and substantially improves whole system for performance, quality, usability. I'm doing last minor fixes for this release and will PM it to you asap.

 

@zuzzu:

Thank you, sir!

That's fantastic to hear -- and I greatly appreciate it!

Be well.
- S.

 

Looks great, will try it soon ;-)

 

I'm nearly done with 1.1! It substantially improves pretty much all existing features and is also a lot faster.

In case of experiencing issues with 1.0, please PM me. It may take some time to Unity to approve the new version for the asset store.

 

Demo or it didn't happened
Just kidding! It was already looking great, I'm really wondering how you improved that.

 

@zuzzu:

A comparison video of v1.0 vs v1.1 would be most useful!

- S.

 

Sure, I will just keep 1.0 web player for comparison.

 

Hello zuzzu,

I am creating a game for Xbox One. The location is in an island and diving is a big part of it. So I have some specific questions about your asset in order to decide if I should buy it or not. I would appreciate your answer.

Did you add the shore line(foam) already?
Did you add the caustics for underwater already?
Can one change colors of the water ( above and below)?

Regards,
Carlos

 

Hey Carlos,

Still no shorelines and caustics, but at least one of these will land in December.

You may manipulate color of water.

 

Hello zuzzu,

Thank you for your quick response. The one I would need first in order to make the product usable in my game is a good shoreline with its foam. Is this one the one that will land in December? I can take care of the caustic if I need to. Please let me know.

An to be sure I understood your answer, you are saying that at it is right now I can change the colors of the water?

Regards,
Carlos

 

To be honest, I'm not sure I need caustics badly to one of our projects here at PlayWay, but everyone else at this thread wants shorelines so I'm seriously taking this into consideration too.

Yes, there are lots of settings.

 

Vote for shore lines too.

 

zuzzu,

Thanks again for you quick response. Your water looks really liquid good! but honestly most developers using Unity3d can create a very acceptable caustic using projector and animating the textures. The thing that is really difficult to come up with for an asset like yours is an acceptable shore line. I would totally buy the asset if the shore line would be added in the December update, otherwise the asset wouldn't fit the needs of my game.

 

Bug? https://gyazo.com/649f096d744592b898330d33a4116f28

 

All right - 1.1 is finished. I will PM it at night to everyone who asked and submit it to the store

I will also update the galleon demo and post a completely new one. Water in both of them will look cooler than in the current ones and be a lot faster.

The first feature I'll work on are dynamic fluids in transparent vessels (like glass of water or aquarium). Sorry, but I need that badly to one of our projects.

That will be the second feature I will work on. If you know some games where that was done well to give me some reference, I would appreciate that. That's going to be tough to make physics "see" these waves, but I already have a head full of ideas.

It's probably fixed in 1.1. I've reworked underwater detection and that's probably the cause.

 

Hello zuzzu,

The shore line doesn't have to be based on physics. All I need is a good foam showing at the point the water meet the shore ground and objects. I have been working on my game using "Realistic Water" asset, but your water looks better than its water, but the shore line that asset has is pretty convincing for my needs. That is why I want to use your asset instead of that one but I need that foam line, since my game takes place in an island at all moment, and the gameplay is based on diving and moving around the shoreline of the island. Here is an example of how that foam line looks in my game:

Regards,
Carlos

 

zuzzu,

On a relate point, whatever system you used to make the shoreline transparent should work for creating the foam on it. I figure.

Regards,
Carlos

 

Ah sure, that's not a problem. I'll need that as a fallback anyway even if I will come up with something better, so you may be sure to get that on December.

I thought that you mean waves breaking at the shore like these (0:20):

I'll give it a shot anyway. I've a few ideas that seem to work on a paper and are pretty physically-correct

 

Looking good man, popped it on the wishlist.
Would also like to see shoreline as carlos mentioned, as Im also looking at a tropical location, but for mobile

 

Ouch it's already morning. I'll send 1.1 to you after a few hours of sleep

​

 

Looks great, but are the demos currently working? I've loaded them both up in a web player browser (safari) but they just stay on the loading bar, never loads and no loading progress.

 

Works for me. Try another browser.

 

May be some networking issue. I can send you a desktop build on Friday, if you are interested.

 

I've included a new demo in the opening post. It is based on version 1.1 and should work fine on AMD hardware. Please remember, however, that in the asset store there is still 1.0, which has issues on AMD. It should get updated in a week or two - depends on how long currently does that take to Asset Store team to process updates.

@Elecman This demo also allows you to zoom out as far as you like. You may disable fog to see it clearly from the distance. Some tiles are visible, but that should be fixable by adapting water settings for such base perspective. If not, that's a bug and I will work on this.

Weather Demo

PS: there is some issue in web player with reflections being mirrored in the opposite horizontal direction. Not sure why, will investigate that later as that doesn't seem to affect any other platform.

 

Weather Demo seems buggy, can only switch Preset once

 

You need to wait for the weather change to finish before choosing another one. That takes 40 seconds.

I've chosen such duration to make the change more natural.

 

I had the same reaction as @Cascho01 at first. Regarding that topic I have two suggestion. The first one is to make the transition shorter (20s at most). The second is to make the progress bar readable; right now it's dark gray on very dark gray. Which leads me to think your monitor's gamma settings are probably set much too bright (which is I suppose why you turned the screen completely black in your first demo).

And a couple of notes on some details: the lens flare effects are really set too high, they're a little too distracting. The second is the water droplets effect is really nice but the tiling is a little too high. Anyway I guess this will be adjustable in the final product so that's alright.

Other than that it looks beautiful. The underwater effect is very cool indeed. If you manage to get some sun rays and caustics in there we're in for a real treat!

But I agree with the other posters that the shoreline feature is perhaps the highest priority.

 

Sure, a build would be great, it's hard to tell the performance on web player (for me it's 10fps).

 

Stumbled across this today and I think it looks fantastic. I've been looking for the definitive ocean shader for quite some time and although I was eyeing a couple, this one looks the best by far. I am definitely going to be picking this up when I have the funds. Great work!

 

Hi,

I have generally an issue because the demo doesn't work. So I'm afraid that the water asset doesn't work on my system.

But some questions anyway:

1) Would it possible to set the water transparency (depth of seeing objects in water) ? Eg. for rivers I do not want to have clean water.

2) Is it possible to set the water color and reflection of the sky or coast reflection?

Thaaks, Q



If you use a vert shader section perhaps this can fix the issue?

Code (CSharp):

1.     #if UNITY_UV_STARTS_AT_TOP
2.             if (_MainTex_TexelSize.y < 0)
3.             {
4.                 uv.y = 1-uv.y;
5.             }
6.             else
7.             {
8.                 yy = 1 - yy;
9.             }
10.             #endif

Code (CSharp):

1. v2f_img vert(appdata_img v) {
2.                 v2f_img o;
3.                 o.pos = mul(UNITY_MATRIX_MVP, v.vertex);
4.                 #ifdef UNITY_HALF_TEXEL_OFFSET
5.                     v.texcoord.y += _MainTex_TexelSize.y;
6.                 #endif
7.                 #if SHADER_API_D3D9
8.                     if (_MainTex_TexelSize.y < 0)
9.                         v.texcoord.y = 1.0 - v.texcoord.y;
10.                 #endif
11.                 o.uv = MultiplyUV(UNITY_MATRIX_TEXTURE0, v.texcoord);
12.                 return o;
13.             }

 

Now tell me that isn't awesome!!!lol

This is my first test in game with PlayWay Water.

More to come.

 

Looks really good. What optimisations do you have? for example, will it still render inland under the ground or can we cull those computations out?

Game is for PS4 at a port town, so we need to really be aggressive with optimisations where possible... thanks for your time!

 

Oh god, I got hypnotized by your fishing video. Anyways, awesome work. I'll buy that whenever it gets on sale. Not that I think it's not worth the price, it's just that I have a low indie budget

 

Hey zuzzu!

So far I'm really liking Playway! It's a great water asset!

I am however having an issue when I build my game. It seems that the water becomes invisible when the game is built however in the editor it looks fine. I'm not quite sure what's going on and I haven't seen any forum posts about this issue. The quality settings are set to Fantastic in and the main camera is using forward rendering. I can see the invisible waves, I just don't seen the nice blue coloring with the waves. I also get some odd mesh issue as shown in the images below.

In the editor:


When I build the game (you can kinda see the waves from the water in this image):


Thanks!

 

Thanks! To make water show up in a build you need to build a shader collection for it:

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If for some reason that doesn't help, click the gear in the corner and then "Rebuild Shader Collection". I've had to introduce this to make builds faster and to, given the complexity of this shader, make its size lower in the build.

Would you like to get the 1.1 update? It has improved a lot.

Culling is going to be added in December update. I haven't needed it for our games so far as all were sea-based. I'm sure that @Plutoman will need it badly for his game and he already bought it, so I feel obligated to improve on this.

Try the Weather Demo. Your machine must be AMD-based and the initial version (1.0) had problems on it. It should be fine now in 1.1.

Yes, you can set the absorption color. It is a concept similar to transparency but more physically-correct in the case of fluids. They absorb colors with varying intensity.

Water color - yes. Reflections - partially, like in the Standard Shader.

 

Perfect! Wow, I really missed that instruction. Thanks man, you rock!

As for the 1.1 update, I can just wait until it's officially released, I'm in no rush.

 

@zuzzu Did any one just say it's awesome! Finally a realistic and full-featured water system for Unity everyone was waiting for.

The Weather Demo is OK in AMD here but not the other 2 demos. I can see the important factor of performance is also good but I'll second that regarding the standalone demo to dive in to this better.

And that would be insane to implement the TODO list. I'm waiting for them.

 

Wow, this the some of the most beautiful water I've ever seen, and it's instantly on my wishlist, though like Jorouss it'll have to wait till it goes on sale, aint easy finding money while studying xD

I have a few questions though, things falling into the ocean, underwater explosions etc. is that supported, will it be supported?
I'm currently building a game around aeroplanes and aerial combat, so I want the player to be able to crash into the ocean, land on it, blow up ships in it, make other aeroplanes crash into it.
Parachute into it and swim around, etc.
Also infinite ocean has been sort of hinted at in different posts, but has never explicitly been stated, if I wanted to fly my aircraft a gazillion miles in one direction, (ignoring floating point errors and all the rest), would that be feasible with this ocean?

 

Thanks! Waves caused by moving rigidbodies - that's something I'm looking at. It may be in December update, but no promises for now.

Underwater explosions are beyond the scope of water system itself, but I need to do something like that anyway for my highest priority game and I see no reason not to share. No ETA though. Probably next year.

Yes, it may be made infinite at will, but as you said, you will still have to deal with the floating point errors.

 

Can't run either on Windows 10 and seems that browser no longer supports wedbuild.
Really wish to see how it runs with large waves in daylight. Can't see in the YouTube video as it is to dark.

Would recommend uploading new video in midday conditions with different sea states.

 

Use IE or Firefox. This demo is the most recent one:

Weather Demo

 

That demo really needs a way to skip the change, important though it may be to see it change naturally.

Also, while just about everything is amazing to behold, I do get the feeling that the seasprays look too off.. even on the highest setting.
I'm by no way an expert in what oceans look like, but here are a few images I found on google

http://st.gde-fon.com/wallpapers_original/536574_more_volna_bryizgi_7476x4982_www.Gde-Fon.com.jpg
In this one there are clear particles from the sea spray.

https://moondustwriter.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/sea-spray-by-tedkerwin1.jpg
The same in this one

http://www.hickerphoto.com/images/500/ocean_spray_mg5903.jpg
In this one it's more like mist in the distance, but it still looks sort of like it's made up of tiny particles.

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7190/6940877193_c94340c79a_b.jpg
Again in this one, water particles/droplets

https://middleofthepacific.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sea-spray-5.jpg
And here

Now, I'm not suggesting that every single droplet should be a particle, that would be crazy heavy.
Nor do I have the foggiest of ideas how it would actually work.

I am however thinking if perhaps some of the techniques from this asset might be applicable, he uses his own shader and some animated spritesheets to make a few quite large particles look rather detailed
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/35069 (I have nothing to do with said asset btw)

 

I just decided to explore the underwater and noticed a bug of sorts

If you go under the water and look up, at times there will be weird artefacts like this:



It looks as though there is somehow a hole in the ocean and you can look through, and thus get the wet-lens effect.
It's possible that it's my hardware though, GeForce GTX 960

I don't mean to poke holes in your software though, really, I just want to help improve it for when I get ahold of it my self xD