can anyone make better looking water?

[elypter]

does anyone who has experience in making animations want to make better looking water and costs?
Real waves or a good looking beach would be cool. this would require a lot of tiles in a texture file when you also make diagonal tiles for complex coastlines but most maps don't use more than 10% anyway. i don't know how hard it would be to make it good looking but there is much potentiality for improvement.

maybe look how it is done in other games.

[Cuban-Pete]

Age of Empires II, The Conquerors, has pretty water, but it's from the top/side/ an angle...

Example
http://static.4players.de/premium/Scree ... llbild.jpg

To make water more beautiful will be difficult. I can make some water, but it needs to fit the game, else it looks ugly.

Currently my main pc is down, the HDD is to repair, so I can't really try anything quick.

[elypter]

Yeah, aoe has good looking water. Unforunately most other 2d rts games use the same perspective. There are maybe old 3d games that use textures for water but most of them don't look good. I think the main target is to find something that matches to itself at the edges.

Btw, the screenshot lets me think of ice and snow textures which would be cool too.

Sorry for your pc. I hope it's not a harddisk failure?

[Cuban-Pete]

Yeah it was failure, HDD got too many error sectors or sumthing. I got all my data backed up, but I could not delete files or as soon as I did a right mouse button on something (folder for example) the explorer crashed and restarted. Very strange, like Windows was dying, haha. I ran error check tool from samsung and it found errors, after that I did format with the tool and it still found errors. I send hdd to samsung and hope I get a new one soon.

You will use other (unused) textures and overwrite them with water textures? I don't know how many you can overwrite, but water will look better if it is less repeated I think, so perhaps combine different textures to make a more "different water animation" or add a wave? I don't know how animation works for water, perhaps it can't have more than 2 textures? I think I first try to add small wave for water against "land sides", when I get HDD back and installed everything. Perhaps we can use "splash" textures when you drop in water for this. GTA2 has those, right? Or am I confused with other game...

I don't promise anything (good), because it will difficult to make it look real/nice.

[Gustavob]

Yeah it was failure, HDD got too many error sectors or sumthing. I got all my data backed up, but I could not delete files or as soon as I did a right mouse button on something (folder for example) the explorer crashed and restarted. Very strange, like Windows was dying, haha. I ran error check tool from samsung and it found errors, after that I did format with the tool and it still found errors. I send hdd to samsung and hope I get a new one soon.

I hope you get a new one soon[2]

I don't know how animation works for water, perhaps it can't have more than 2 textures?

GTA2 uses 12 water textures in the water animation (tiles 608-619 in every sty files)

Perhaps we can use "splash" textures when you drop in water. GTA2 has those, right? Or am I confused with other game...

GTA2 has "splash" textures but its hard to find them in the sty files with STY Tool

[BenMillard]

Splashes, fires and sparks are particle effects so you won't find textures for those. Explosions are done as textures, I guess because they don't last long and they are such a focal point of the gameplay.

[elypter]

Yeah it was failure, HDD got too many error sectors or sumthing. I got all my data backed up, but I could not delete files or as soon as I did a right mouse button on something (folder for example) the explorer crashed and restarted. Very strange, like Windows was dying, haha. I ran error check tool from samsung and it found errors, after that I did format with the tool and it still found errors. I send hdd to samsung and hope I get a new one soon.

good you have a backup. reminds me of doing something

You will use other (unused) textures and overwrite them with water textures? I don't know how many you can overwrite, but water will look better if it is less repeated I think, so perhaps combine different textures to make a more "different water animation" or add a wave? I don't know how animation works for water, perhaps it can't have more than 2 textures? I think I first try to add small wave for water against "land sides", when I get HDD back and installed everything. Perhaps we can use "splash" textures when you drop in water for this. GTA2 has those, right? Or am I confused with other game...

I don't promise anything (good), because it will difficult to make it look real/nice.

water in gta works this way:
-the first tile of the animation must have surface set to water in the sty file
-it must be an animation of any length (doable in dma editor)
-you can make as many water animations as you want.

A wave that is 2 textures wide would definitely look better but it might be necessary to make also a 1 texture version for complex coastlines then. But even with one wave on the ocean and one at the coast you could do a lot.

[Cuban-Pete]

Wow, what a fail today...

Here a two failed animation tests...

First try, simple overlay image, looks static and crap:

wave_test_1.gif (42.47 KiB) Viewed 16227 times

Second try, to make a counter wave... I think my auto coding fcked up somewhere big time...

wave_test_2_fail.gif (24.31 KiB) Viewed 16227 times

Here is the normal wave... for reference

wave_test_normal.gif (20.34 KiB) Viewed 16227 times

[elypter]

maybe the second one could be an improvement when done with some kind of bending effect instead of moving layer.
but for really good looking ones i think external material is required.
i tried to find some water animation but always the perspective is wrong.
i don't think we will find a ready to use textures out of a game except someone knows a game in same perspective as gta that is newer and looks better.

i think there are 2 possibilities where such material could be taken from. a lucky find of bird perspective water and waves on youtube or any video platform. or record really good looking water with fraps in the debug mode of a high end game.

[elypter]

I found a very useful plugin for photoshop: ImageSynth
It allows you to generate a seamless tile out of an non seamless image. Which i already used for static textures might maybe useful for dynamic ones too.

[Cuban-Pete]

No image?

[elypter]

added a before after example