Now that v3 has been out for a while I'm raising an issue which was originally mentioned in regard to v2, namely Boat/Ship wakes on 3D waves. How are the Effects team getting on with the extrusion of 2D ship wakes onto the 3D surface of waves (rather than having the 2D wake slice through them)?
Also, what are the prospects for having Boats/Ships move (rotate and translate, see below) about their center of gravity according to wave state and direction? Even simple pitching and rolling using some proxy or other would be a huge improvement for the interim.
Finally, how about some realistic 3D bow waves effects? A single effect could be scaled according to wave state, speed of the vessel etc. In other words, the effect could be tiny on calm seas at low speed or a big splash as the bow of a fast ship crashes into a big wave?
Many thanks
Andy
i7-8086K OC @ 5GHz, 64 Gb RAM, GTX 1080ti
Win10 Pro 64-bit, HP Reverb G2
Saldo wrote:... as this is Flightsimulator software and not Boatsimulator software....
Not entirely correct. From the front page:
Prepar3D (pronounced “prepared”) is a visual simulation platform that allows users to create training scenarios across aviation, maritime and ground domains. Users can train anywhere in the virtual world, from underwater to sub orbital space.
Larry Robinson has done a very good job with the wakes including the rising and falling bow wakes in his Puget Sound Ferry packages. https://larobinson22.wordpress.com
Perhaps I can offer a comment: the triton.config file in the Triton Resources folder has an entire section devoted to ship wake settings although the LM guys have not implemented it to my knowledge. It includes prop wash, spray, the Kelvin wake, etc. I would expect that creating a 3D wake in this way would be quite resource intensive, perhaps enough so that it's not currently practical. As is, conventional wake effects are sometimes dropped when other needs take precedence, and by comparison, these wake effects are quite simple.
Many thanks for your reply Larry. I see what you mean about Triton. I did some reading and on another thread there was some mention of it not being implemented because it was unstable with CUDA on nVidia cards? I think this may be the reason for LM holding off on implementing it?
Perhaps Beau could clarify?
Many thanks.
i7-8086K OC @ 5GHz, 64 Gb RAM, GTX 1080ti
Win10 Pro 64-bit, HP Reverb G2
We use Triton's wave simulation to generate a tiling texture with the 3d wave and foam information baked in, but we do all the actual terrain/water rendering through our engine. The bulk of the features listed on Triton's product page rely on Triton's rendering engine, and so we do not use them. We already have our own system for wakes and particle effects, which are configurable via our SDK. The plan moving forward is to improve our existing effects, wakes, and simulation to make them work better with the 3d water surface. We don't recommend making any changes to the Triton.cfg as our simulation and rendering is tuned to work with the values in the cfg that we ship with Prepar3D.
I guess this means that I should continue to experiment with wake effects. In that regard, can you tell me if the property rendertype ("This value is specific for wake effects. Set it to 1 for wake") has an effect? It's not used in the stock wake effects that I have checked, and when I added it to some of my test wakes in earlier P3D versions I could not notice a difference.
It does indeed work! I landed my first helo on a pitching Frigate deck this evening in a rough sea state. It needs a video to illustrate the effect though.
i7-8086K OC @ 5GHz, 64 Gb RAM, GTX 1080ti
Win10 Pro 64-bit, HP Reverb G2
First, a HUGE thank you for the early Christmas present of v3.1!
Second, would you be able to give us more details here regarding what has changed and how, in terms of water?
It would also be great to have some advice for those of us making ships for P3D regarding optimum settings (inc. in the ship's cfg) for the greatest realism.
Thanks again.
Andy
i7-8086K OC @ 5GHz, 64 Gb RAM, GTX 1080ti
Win10 Pro 64-bit, HP Reverb G2
Boats in v3.1; wakes and motions
Great job on the new water related features LM team! My preliminary findings:
Wakes: the new "Ground Decal=1" line in the [Particle.n] sections of the wake .fx files is really slick. The wakes I've been working on look so much better. Just to confirm, it looks like I can just leave the Ground Normal = 1 setting as is.
Using the Client Update method, it looks like the wakes of the default boats are still displaying at the datum and that the default sim.cfg has not been changed. I'm hoping that adding Ground Normal = 1 to the appropriate particle sections of the effects file will solve this. (For those who might want to experiment it's worth remembering that wake effect files have multiple emitters and there may be some that are not intended to display on the water surface.)
My sense is that boat motions in response to 3D waves are slightly excessive and somewhat too fast for small boats (eg 5 meters). Is there a way to moderate this effect? For the heck of it I tried using the damping ratio = setting without seeing any change.
For larger boats like ferries, the motions using my existing sim.cfg are completely unrealistic. In a 16 knot wind, one of my 134 meter WSF ferries periodically puts the car deck awash and rolls such that passengers would go over the side. The solution however works fine; adding always_use_avg_surface=1 to the sim.cfg. I hope this line will be ignored by FSX; that would make things simple. That's it for my first look.
