Better water rendering

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

I have a request for the graphics team.

 

It's been quite a while since the improved water after the old 1.5 version came out. Since then, the new water has had some important flaws that never were addressed/improved:

 

1- Wave size is way too big, at any wind level, and is not correctly affected by distance/altitude. As soon as wind is not zero, It will look pretty much the same at 10k, 30k, 50k or 80k ft which causes an odd visual mismatch that ruins the sense of altitude. Guess this is because there is not a FFT modelling for the water.

 

2- Water rendering lacks proper sun reflection (and glitter) simulation (or at least an artistic representation), making water look unrealistic and outdated. This is one of the most important things, together with wave size, to get realistic water depiction.

 

3- White caps are too big too and have such a low quality texture that look really bad and unrealistic. On top of that, they evolve way too fast, specially considering their extreme size.

 

4- Shadows over water bodies are glitchy sice years now.

 

5- Water reflections are way too crisp for the level of waviness of the water's surface, even in extremely calm water, reflections would never look so clear, let alone sea/ocean water bodies with moderate to high levels of light dispersion due to waves. Reflections should look diffuse and spread along the deformations caused by the waves according to the state of the sea.

 

6- 3D clouds are not reflected over water. Only fake cirrus are.

 

We spend A LOT of time over the water, even more now that we have supercarriers for naval ops (and the future Marianas map), so in order to improve inmersion and realism in these conditions where all one will see is water all around, I think it would be very nice to make some improvements to water.

 

To clarify a couple of points:

 

1-

 

From 10k to 80k ft (only 10 knots wind)

 

The waves look pretty much the same at all altitudes up the the max I could go (80k) and the size of waves at 10knots wind is extremely big. White caps look too big too at any altitude giving a wrong sense of scale.

 

 

2-

 

Sun light tends to scatter along the water up to the horizon as from certain angle and depending on waviness. The higher the waviness the more light is reflected from a farther point and the lower the intensity of the reflection, making the water reflection look satinated, whitish or milky. In dcs we have only pure surface reflection of the sun, which together with the wave size issue makes for a really bad looking water depiction.

 

DCS

How it should be

 

For those worried about this just being a combat simulator, I would say this is just a graphics thing that shouldnt have anything to do with the people in charge of the simulator part of the product so it shouldnt interfere. Graphics do matter and, as I said already, we spend a lot of time over the water so why not making it look better, at least making it look "ok". At the moment, it looks quite bad so not "nitpicking" nor asking for perfection. And no, all this would not melt our PC's.

 

 

Edited January 11, 2021 by Ala12Rv-watermanpc

[Buzzles]

The height aspect certainly needs to be looked at, it definitely shouldn't be the same at altitude.

[bies]

Actually you did a great job systematically explaining the case.

 

With such a big emphasis on carrier operations and water masses in nearly every map the water itself deserves an overhaul.

[rayrayblues]

+1

[borisbarzotto]

wow great analysis right there :notworthy:

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Glad to see more people are interested in this, and thanks for the kind words!:thumbup:

 

At least the waves size and the unrealistic sun reflection, which seems like a very simplistic and artificial representation of the real thing, could be improved, otherwise, water won't really resemble ocean water in its current state. Being commongly flying over big water bodies in literally all maps (except Nevada), and with a high naval activity in the community, I think it would be worth it to nail water visual depiction as much as possible (it should be quite cheap in terms of performance too).

 

At the moment, the DCS's water seems to only represent how water looks when very, very close to it and just use that behaviour for all the different conditions, distances, sun angles, ocean states, etc. so it always looks something like this (even at 80k ft):

 

 

However, sun light (and sun reflection) have a very different behaviour over the water at the huge distances we are managing in a flight sim, causing very specific phenomena, different from small water masses and/or little distances. Water waves far away in the distance will deflect sun light in many directions, acting like millions of little mirros, which will cause (together with the sphericity of the planet, among other factors) that particular elongated look.

 

To further illustrate the thread with some examples of the real life light reflection over water here are some pics:

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure if the voting system of the threads is of any utility, in case it is, please vote for this, maybe that will catch devs attention.

 

thanks!

[Northstar98]

+1 awesome stuff! :thumbup:

[oreste]

I would very much like to be able to create a sea with strong winds and high waves, weather conditions that would put a strain on a landing on the aircraft carrier or make it impossible. I would also like to see the effect of a plane or a helicopter flying low over the sea, the waves it produces. We can see a similar effect on the ground, a lot of dust is raised by the helicopters, the effect of gunfire on the water is also very nice to see.

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Would like to add to all this that waves don't seem to scale with distance not only vertically but also along the longitudinal dimension, which means they will look same size, up to the horizon, once you zoom in a bit:

 

 

Of course, waves should make smaller longitudinally too:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 10, 2020 by watermanpc

[obious]

One thing I’ll say is that this problem is made even worse when looking at water through the tpod; waves look comically large 

[Northstar98]

I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of what we see is due to performance concerns. Though with TGPs it just might be how they render.

[Gunslinger22]

+1 on this, the water looks really disappointing and ruins the immersion of altitude when in VR flying over the ocean and bodies of water! 

[Madone]

+1 I never understood why the sea was looking odd when flying low, now I know!

[OttoPus]

+1

[falcon_120]

Of course +1.

First the team is focused on Clouds but this could be an interesting next step.

[Fri13]

On 1/7/2021 at 8:41 PM, falcon_120 said:

Of course +1.

First the team is focused on Clouds but this could be an interesting next step.

 

Check out the clouds reflections in Wags second video:

 

 

 

The waves part is causing such problem that sun and clouds reflections are.... something else.

 

This is the problem when you enhance something, then it comes more obvious that some other part looks older.

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Yeah, I noticed the reflections of the clouds over the water, however, they seem to be way too low res, to a point that they flicker and pop in quite crazily.

 

First few seconds of this video:

 

 

Certain other modern civil simulator, has also low res water reflections, however, it looks like the reflections are actually affected by the surface deformations the waves cause, which helps a ton making reflections look very nice and smooth. The more waviness you have, the smoother (and less visible) the reflections become, while the sun reflection becomes wider but less bright as light dispersion is higher. In DCS, it seems like water reflections are somehow "behind" the waves effect and thus not being affected by them, causing a too crisp/too "static" reflections that due to the low res will look odd and distracting as far as what they have shown to date. Another reason to improve water effect imho.

[Northstar98]

On 1/8/2021 at 11:24 PM, Fri13 said:

This is the problem when you enhance something, then it comes more obvious that some other part looks older.

 

Well said! Not just in reflections but also in assets.

Edited January 10, 2021 by Northstar98

[Madone]

Well thanks now I can't unsee that! lol Hope this gets fixed. 

[Lurker]

One other thing to consider with Water. Apparently water has a huge effect on performance, more so than should be warranted. For this reason I have to keep Water on Low, on Medium or High it tanks my framereates in VR (And I have a decent system with RTX3090) 

 

We desperately need some performance improvements with regards to water. I have a sneaking suspicion that the engine draws water everywhere (even under the terrain) which makes it unnecessarily taxing with regards to performance, and it seems to be something that is CPU heavy as well. 

[Northstar98]

3 minutes ago, Lurker said:

One other thing to consider with Water. Apparently water has a huge effect on performance, more so than should be warranted. For this reason I have to keep Water on Low, on Medium or High it tanks my framereates in VR (And I have a decent system with RTX3090) 

 

We desperately need some performance improvements with regards to water. I have a sneaking suspicion that the engine draws water everywhere (even under the terrain) which makes it unnecessarily taxing with regards to performance, and it seems to be something that is CPU heavy as well. 

 

Interesting, I've never had a problem with it after 2.5. But yes, the 'regular' water (not sure what word to use to describe it, large bodies maybe?) is drawn absolutely everywhere, including underneath the terrain, which is similar in other stuff.

 

However, I wonder if it would be possible to have water like it is in lakes and rivers, which is in a confined area, which allows them to be at different elevations. It's just that there are some areas that have a negative altitude below MSL.

 

The water still has waves (though unaffected by windspeed AFAIK), it is transparent (though if you manage to go underwater in the 'regular' water, there's an actual underwater, like Silent Hunter, I'm not sure the same applies to rivers and lakes). 

[Cthulhus]

+1 on this.

[Snacko]

+1

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Looks like something is being done about this issue:

 

 

Definitely it needs a lot more of work but at least, seems like the size of the waves is getting some love. Hope the sun reflection and the glitter representation at high altitudes get it too.

[Ala12Rv-watermanpc]

Nice to see ED is working on the sun's reflection on the water, according to the lastest news images:

 

 

Can't wait to fly over that smooth and nice glitter effect!