plop water/game water transitions

[ldvger 19]

Show us your attempts to break this barrier, please!  This remains the single largest challenge to creating naturalistic game environments. 

I have been working on this for years, literally, and feel like I may be coming close, but I would like to see how others have addressed this issue...and know how they did it. 

Given the built-in parameters of the game engine, it may be impossible to seamlessly integrate plop water with game water...but I am not yet willing to give up.  I know there are LOT and BAT and MOD and DAT folks out there who can figure this out.

We have many options for above sea level water now, most of which are excellent.  Nw we need to figure out a way to tie plop water into game water. 

Lora/LD

[ArchangelMichael 51]

Lora,

I do not typically use transparent ploppable water (TPW), so I have no secrets, methods, or pics to share with you.  The good news, though, is that work is being done on some very nice looking water mods that will have some matching TPW to go with them.  The intent is to accomplish exactly what you are seeking.  Maybe they read your mind!  (And the minds of several other realism enthusiasts, as well.)  You can keep tabs on the progress here.  There are some pics from Ennedi above that post, and more from Chrisadams3997 on the first page of that thread as well.   I also recommend checking out some other examples of Ennedi's excellent work, if you have not yet seen it.  Like Dedgren at 3RR, he uses his MD to showcase modding experiments, many of which are quite intensive and thorough.  Browse the table of contents -- you'll see what I mean.

Have fun!

Mike

[CaptCity 4,752]

abcvs has done some nice looking things at Peg's site with Peg's PPond Kit and Brigatine water mod. You might check it out here and here...

[ldvger 19]

Good to see some responses, I hope this continues!

ArchangelMichael, I followed your links and viewed Ennedi's work and found it comendable.  I did not read the entire MD through it's 46 pages and maybe I should because what I saw was pre-TPWand I am committed to using the TPW plop water.  Ennedi made some very pretty streams and rivers, without a doubt, and all kudos to him, but this is not exactly what I am looking for/hoping for. 

CaptCity, I also went and looked at abcvs's stuff and he is a lot closer to what I am hoping for, but at about the same point I am at...which is not quite there yet (at least as far as I'm concerned).  I love all the PPEG pond tools but am not overly fonf of the PW because it is not transparent.  Also, the transitions abcvs manages to achieve only work with "waves" turned off for the period of time one needs to take a snapshot and if one leaves waves turned off then one loses what is to me an important point of realism with seashores...waves. 

I love and am wanting to use jeronij's blue TPW as my default PW.  I have found that by laying down some Edmonton PW tiles in the center of a watercourse, then using a tile of PEG's Tahoe PW on either side of the Edmonton, then using jeronij's "grass" to blur the edges between the Thaoe and the blue TPW works very well to create a river or stream. 

I also love PEG's "Brignatine" water mod when combined with the Edmonton v2.  I think this gives the game water the most realistic look and feel of any of the water mods I have tried.  However, it doesn't work at all well with the PW I am using, so I have been experimenting with other combinations and recently found that this combo works really well for matching PW with game water:

For game water:

Edmonton v2

Dogfight's Green Water mod

For Plop water:

jeronij's blue TPW

The color of the deep game water and the TPW are almost a 100% match. 

The problem is (one of many, actually) that natural shorelines become shallower as they approach land and so the water becomes more transparent and lighter and shows more of the underlying terrain under the seashore.  With waves turned on, this means the game water close to shore is almost white on shallow beachs.  And in RL most watercourses meet the sea in very shallow water. 

However, it is also true that most watercourses continue to dig a channel in the shore bed once they join the sea.  So, water in the channel will be deeper than the water around it.  I am ignoring, for now, the case of extensively braided river deltas...don't know as this game will ever be able to render such, given the limitations. 

So I have been playing with a couple of ideas.  My first idea was to use the god mode tools and use the level terrain tool from a deep water part of the sea to the mouth of a river.  I did this by raising terrain to lower sea level, then using a place I knew was deep enough sea level to create the dark water I need to match my PW.  I set the tool at lowest levels and dragged/painted an channel from deep sea to river mouth, then lowere tarrain to restore seas level to normal.  I looks pretty good and very realsitic...up to a point.  I won;t go into details here, but I fudged around for several game sessions and was still not able to get the PW to blend with the game water.

So I thought, maybe I am going about this the wrong way.  Maybe I need to find a way to extend the land into the sea.  So I tried that too and have to admit had somewhat decent results.

Right now my biggest problem is waves and transparency of game water in shallow water. 

Second problem is that despite the nearly perfect color match between game water and PW I've found, I don't like the way the water mod looks.  There is no surface texture.

I know nothing about batting or lotting or datting, so I don;t know how challenging this issue is to folks who are trying to make this easier for the rest of us.  I am unemployed and have a lot of time of my hands, so I would be willing to learn and try to solve this issue myself, and sahe with others, if someone would point me in the right direction. 

I have two mega regions, both gorgeous, that need extensive work in installing above ground water and until I resolve this issue to my own satisfaction, I doubt I will ever build on either of them (which is a shame, I know).  I have long felt that I'm probably the only one that obsesses about this (OCD, anyone?), but maybe others out there are want this resolved, somehow, as much as I do.

Lora/LD

[ldvger 19]

Ok, I have been playing around and this is what I've come up with so far.  Comments/suggestions would be appreciated.  First a pic, and then and explanation of what I did to achieve this:

This was a "down and dirty" experiment, so it leaves much to be desired in the manner of detailing, not to mention lots of wiggle room for improvements in other ways. 

The king pin of this is PEG's Hydro Dam_Small.  I had to find a way to finesse the dirrernce in elevation between the river/lake and the sea/game water.  This is a big compromise over what I REALLY want to be able to accomplish, but it may be a step in the right direction...time will tell.  Anyway, I used 3 of the Hydro Dams side by side to each other to span the width of the river mouth (this is actually a river, not a lake, and it's a fairly good sozed river, about 12 tiles wide).  I had to do some terraforming using both God Mode and Major Mode tools, as well as streets in single tiles and end-to-end tiles.

I am using, also, the combinations of water mods/textures I listed in the previous post.

First thing I did was raise terrain 2 clicks in God Mode, then use the Level Terrain tool at it's smallest setting of 1 to create a level channel from deep sea water area (which doesn't show in this photo) to the mouth of the river.  This created the cliff-like shore line you can see in the lower right hand side of the pic.  This wasn't acceptable for what I had in mind, so I used the God Mode Soften tool, again at it's smallest level and softened the slopes around the river mouth down so all the rockiness was gone and every thing was grassy. 

Then I had to create a uniform slope across the river mouth to install the Hydro Dams, so I used single tile street plops across the bottom of the seaside and then again across the top of the river bed on the other side.  Then I dragged street tiles from the top to the bottom, one right next to the other, all the way across the 12 tiles I wanted to install the Hydro Dams across.  Not all of the dragged street tiles met with the bottom single tiles, as you can see if you look at the right side of the dam.  A little "cove" got created there which in the future, if I use this technique again, I would soften down and blend into the sea side of the shoreline.  Once I was satisfied with my uniform slope, I used the God Mode Lower Terrain tool 2 clicks to restore sea level to normal.  Then I plopped the dams into place, aligning them end to end with each other.  I probably should have gone one more dam section, but this was an experiement, so the right side of the dam isn't really as well connected to the dry land as it could be.  I put a bunch of large boulders over there (PEG's) to cover this up, but they don't show very well here.

To build the river itself, I started by laying down Edmonton PW tiles all the way across the back of the dam and then tapeing them off slowly to the center of the dam as I went upstream.  When I actually build this river for real, I'll continue to use the Edmonton tiles in the center of the river, as they give a great illusion of depth.  Next I laid down a border of PEG's Tahoe PW tiles.  They are lighter than the Edmonton and I think using them in conjuction with each other gives an illusion of gradually shallowing water as the river nears the riverside.  Past experimenting shows that using some of jeronij's "grass" along the transition lines between the Edmonton and the Tahoe PWs helps to blur the differences in color between them.  I also like using the grass at the edge of the Tahoe PW, too, to again blur the transition from Tahoe to jeronij's TPW (dark blue).  I did not use the grass in this experiment, though (I forgot that step).

Next is filling in the entire river bed with the TPW, going over the top of both the Tahoe and the Edmonton.  After that it's just detailing the riversides, so I played with a bunch of new rocks and plants I've recently downloaded and noticed that for some reason a bunch of stuff I used to have has for some reason disappeared.  So now I get to go back into my plugins file and see if I can find the stuff I want and re-install it. 

The biggest drawback is that I am not able to install the water turbulence effects at the base of the dam the way I had been hoping to, as those tiles (PEG's from the PPond pack) won't install over water. 

However, I think the color match between the water on the sea side of the dam and the water behind the dam is very good, and that was one of the big things I was trying to achieve.  I may be able to create a "shelf" of sea level land on the sea side of the dam that will allow these effects to be plopped...something to try for next time around.

I'm also not really happy with the way my game water looks using both Edmonton v2 and dogfight's Green Water Mod.  The water is flat, without any texture at all, and it's jaggedy/pixelated as it changes in color going from shallow to deep water, which I really don't like at all.  So, I am going to try some other combos and see if I can come up with anything better.

What do you think?  I'm very interested in any/all feedback.

Lora/LD