Friday Blog 240 - Significantly Improved Water: Transparency

As long as Colony Survival has been publicly available, people have called the water block the ugliest in-game block. It has always been a pain point. Water is actually a very strange material. Unlike sand or stone or grass or wood, you’re not simply looking at a static surface. Water is transparent and reflective, and big bodies of water are always moving.

Both transparency and reflections are complicated and costly to pull off right. Many games have static worlds, meaning the major features of buildings and terrain aren’t really moving. Simultaneously, their water is often also something that can’t really be moved, and which always acts as a simple 2D surface. It’s a lot easier to make this simplified water look realistic.

But in our game, it’s not so simple. Players can completely change the terrain and they have to manually add the buildings. They can dig canals and make the water dynamically move to new spots. The water actually consists of 3D blocks which can be viewed from all sides.

Our old solution was to just give it a ‘physical surface’ like all the other blocks, and to make the textures move around automatically to simulate little waves. It worked when you looked at it from a distance and didn’t think about it too much, but when you got close and focused on it it was quite weird.

But now, Zun has taken the time to look at the water properly, and to figure out a form of transparency that works well with our lighting system. We’re very happy with the results! All the pictures in this blog show the new water. It hasn’t been released publicly yet, but expect it to be part of the new patch.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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