Surface Waves - Dynamic Rivers, Lakes and Oceans

Hey @RC-1290,
is it possible to set water level to some value?
Let's say that I would like to have "fixed" water level to "10 on Y-axis". So every water that would fall to that "lake" will produce waves but do not change the height of water.
Also if I would modify terrain to create a new lake that is not connected to the previous one, would that be filled with water to 10 on Y-axis?

 

This looked like a neat asset. Is it still being maintained, and does it work for URP or HDRP?

 

It's not really active, though I have tried to address basic functionality issues when they came up during Unity updates. I haven't seen an e-mail about this in a while though, so I'm not sure if that's still correctly listed.

If I recall correctly, I resolved that issue, and the version on the asset store is the latest.

 

I understand that frustration. What I currently earn from the sales of this asset does not justify active development, and I'm not convinced that lowering the price will significantly increase the number of sales. Though it might be interesting experiment to participate in some sales from time to time.

As for Gaia compatibility — what do you mean with that exactly? I'm not super familiar with Gaia, but if a depth camera can see it, Surface Waves should already be compatible.

 

You could use the simulation saver/loader to initialize a certain level. You would first fill up the scene with various sources, and then save that to a texture, and load it when starting the scene.

But what you're probably looking for is something like you see in Cities Skyline, and I think that would require writing an entirely new water source.

 

Thanks. I have been fixing cases where it straight up didn't work, and answering support emails where I could, but it hasn't been my full-time work for years.

I haven't tried it with URP and HDRP, though given the tech stack that those live in, I don't think it would make sense to port Surface Waves directly to those. Back in the day, it made sense to me to simulate everything on the GPU, because I wasn't about to write SIMD code on the CPU (unlike the developer behind From Dust). But I think it now makes more sense to write a simulation like this using the Jobs system and the burst compiler.

Surface Waves has always had the problem that it was really hard to make it interact with gameplay code, because all the data was on the GPU. And the whole fun of simulated waves is that you can play with them, so if you can't easily write scripts that interact with it, that kind of defeats the purpose.

Running the simulation on the CPU would probably also be easier to optimize in combination with the rest of your game, unless you really love modifying things to fully make use of async compute.

With a DOTS version it would make sense to support the URP, though at that point it would probably also work more like a regular mesh.

It does seem like a fun project I could learn some things from, but I'm not going to promise anything.