Well perhaps they can make the water less transparent to compensate for graphic demand. I'd rather have water with less see through ability then water that acts like paper. But perhaps you can give a option to make water clearer in the graphic menu depending how strong your computer is. Not everyone has a 4000 dollar computer with state of the art graphics card. Why there is graphic settings to set make it to where your computer can handle it. Low, Medium, High, Ultra. I don't expect 300 dollar laptops having enough strength to run medium graphics.
300 dollar laptops are never going to run this game properly period, no matter what era it is. PCs have come a long way since 2015. Water should be better. Answers from devs would be even better still !
"Less" or "more" transparent makes zero difference : it's transparent to X degree, and forces the game engine to trace light in there and apply a shader based on a factor. Water, in ALL games, is a performance bottleneck. The terrains (planets) are made from voxel systems, they are not simple environments, and they can be deformed by players. It's much easier to make fishes and put plants in water than to change the water physics and behavior. Modelizing fluids is anything but trivial, and I trust players to put this in perspective with the actual physics we have with air : making ships/ structures to have air and be airtight is a constant struggle and can be broken easily, and "air" has no visual representation like water. This game is neither Space Engineers nor Subnautica nor minecraft, and all these games have their own specifics regarding performance and features, that were evidently made from the ground up. Some may think that just having a powerful computer can solve evrything, but the reality is that simulations are all limited to basics to be able to run adequatly at a decent framerate. It's not asking from the devs to find a solution, it's asking for Unity to be a different engine. Edit : just some additional information ----------------- This is the "water" system in Unreal Engine (4), right out-of-the-box : https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/BuildingWorlds/Water/index.html There is also the particle system for waterfalls and mist effects, etc. This was "water" in Unity, older versions : https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-Water.html And "water" in Unity, actual (recent) version : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/30_search.html?q=water The best I could find was some general pointers, but basically this shows a radical difference : Unreal makes complex systems readily available for free, for all users, and explains how things work. Unity ? Looks like "water" was not their preferred domain, so they simply made it "obscure" and avoid the topic entirely, sending users either to old (legacy) documentation, or send them to the assets store, where "others" solved problems for them, and the Unity devs can wash their hands if users have problems with store assets. It's no surprise that recently, Unity decided to ditch their "online collaborative environment". It took me around 30 minutes just trying to opt-out from all the forced "opted-in" defaults from that intrusive feature, just to see it removed a few weeks later. So I'm not surprised at all that "water" is just "avoided" in the manual, it's very much in-line with the whole "Unity" ecosystem... .
T Then I guess the devs have no reason to work on water from what your saying. Cause its too difficult. If that is the case then paper water is the best we got right now. And if it is really that difficult to have functional simulated water then they can just make all water frozen ice and be done with it like in Space engineers. Ice would still be water and can be mined for oxygen/Hydrogen but least it be voxels instead of complex coded simulated water. I guess frozen ice lakes would be easier.
Well they did not "close the door" but to make dynamic water is not the same hurdle as restraining some entities in a specific "deep sea biome". The latter can be done without having to re-work all the procedural terrain generation - hello bugs and glitches for months... But it's just showing how hard it is to make such a game in Unity. I can only dream of what they could have achieved if they had started their project in a much more capable engine. That's the problem with Unity : very attractive for starters, but very hard to scale up projects when performance problems start knocking at the door... .
They do not have space playfields, voxel building and voxel terrain ( or seabed). Besides that I think they're like over 60 employees just for the "Subnautica" branch, but I can't find the exact number. I read that a while ago. Imagin just how much performance they can save by simply avoiding forests, rocks and grass and all the stuff there is on a temperate planet.
From what I see they use resources from different branches of the main company to work on all their projects. https://unknownworlds.com/subnautica/the-crew-of-subnautica/ That's still way more resources than Eleon, with a more "controllable" project environment using static terrain & usual stuff. Also note that in Empyrion players often complain about fog, while underwater it's perfectly normal, so in Subnautica they can "abuse" of that method to shorten render distance, whereas in Empyrion it looks weird when flying. I'm off now, have to go clean up the snow... 3rd day in a row we get more than 6 - 8 inches of damp snow... tired... I used to love winter, but not anymore. ^^ .
I mean... don't get me wrong... there's absolutely no question that water in voxel-based games ifsway more difficult. It's important to remember that subnautica lacks any need to ever restructure it's water. It has no rivers. It has no terrain that can be modified. It's effectively 'pre-baked'. I think there's like one scene that features interior water that changes levels, and that scene uses pre-defined areas to create water following a carefully orchestrated script. With all of that said... it doesn't mean that people don't want better water. And people should want better water. And in the end, it's in Eleon's best interest to make better water, I don't think they'll disagree. But it's in Eleon's best interested to make all sorts of improvements to EGS and I can probably think of a half-dozen big things that I consider more pressing. The water has only ever been a mild annoyance.
Good idea. I'm going to bake pastry tonight, and to hell with modeling for now. . ( Edit : not even true... I'm back at it.... can't resist... ) .
If I were to guess water would be second or third from the bottom of there list right now. But if trolls starts going into there official servers and starts leaving air pockets and air voids in major lakes and what not on planets they may be force to convert all water to a solid ice till they can properly fix water. Cause you can create grief with the drill. And if you start using the drill on the water you can make lakes and oceans look like crap. If you want me too I'll make a creative game just to demonstrate this with loads of screenshots on how you really make water into a borked mess. Okay in these screeshots I dug a test hole on the beach shore. I then used a stock tier 1 HV and tried to hover past the air pocket I made with the drill the HV sunk like a rock all the way to the bottom where I dug. I then proceeded to take off my helmet I got free air cause of the air pocket and plus the test HV is now stuck in the test hole. And this is V1.4 patch new current. Surprising enough the water surface actually filled on top but not on the bottom cause once I made the air pocket the HV sunk like a rock. If someone wanted too they can stop HV's from crossing a lake by making a Air pocket this will cause HV's to sink like a rock cause the water no longer has any surface tension from the air pocket. I could report this as a bug but then again it is only a half bug cause it is lower the minor or trivial. I should not be getting free oxygen underwater with the drill.
Unity has water modelling also, and that Unreal engine modelling, is no better when scaled out in Empyrion across 200 planets..... This is why the Subnautica suggestion was made, because its LIGHT on performance. It Absolutely can work, if the time is taken to do flood animations sounds etc to sync it all up, we dont actually need real physical water in the base........Subnautica does not have real dynamic water in the base, its not volumetric, its not even water its literally just a local animation, local being in the clients PC, not even the server needs to run that, it just needs your position and a couple of other things. So anyone who says this is not possible, has not looked at how Subnautica did there water. For bases thats fine. Now the lighting, we have poor underwater lighting to shorten the draw distance, the view range of the player, this means less intense rendering, Subnautica allows for further distance in viewing, and better lighting, but at a cost but Subnautica is not running a dozen planets, just one so it can afford that, Empyrion makes under water view distance less to curve that performance hit. Why are our underwater environments not as colourful and vibrant as Subnautica, same reason, performance. Flying over a lake, having to do massive fast rendering of all of that bright colourful environment, fail. So we do have our limitations, but flood animations are not one of them. Add proper floatation to the water and your really making water something then, because then boats are going to work properly. Heck at that stage you could even add a new starter core, for boats.....One designed to float. PN did this, works fine. We have a few options inside of Unity that work, Empyrions problem is simply that it is not doing any of them............. Water as it is now, still our so called placeholder, is a poor effort, just go use a multitool by any lake edge for some real immersion breaking shizlings. So do we just accept that or maybe let the devs know how **** our water still is in the hope it gets improved ? I dunno just sayin...
I can sink HV's with these air pockets. It looks like a bug to me. There not supposed to be there. I'm rather shocked and dumbfounded they think this isn't a bug. But okay. But why isn't it a bug? It has all the characteristics of a bug. Exploited free oxygen, Sinking of HV's. If this isn't a bug then I don't know what is a bug then. I thought bugs is something that is ether malfunctioning or a exploit with something in the game. Well it is both so it has to be a bug in my opinon. Further Screenshot: Another T6C on the bottom. From Air pocket. How is this not a bug? Well then I guess i'm not going to use HV's anymore till they fix this problem. If it isn't a bug then it has to be a problem then. I only put moderate in the bug severity cause it has the ability to sink HV's. If it just gave you free oxygen then it would have just been trivial. But the air pockets you can make sinks HV's my screenshot proves this. A HV is supposed to hover above the water like it supposed to but once you make that air pocket it sinks. There is nothing to hold it up once those Hover engines detects that air pocket. I just made HV's completely useless on the water. All I have to do is make a air pocket with the drill an I can start sinking HV's. Doesn't matter if it is T1, T6 or t100 there going down to the lake floor and good luck trying to get them out cause they go snail speed it will take you day to reach the shore to get out with it. To be be frank i'm rather annoyed the devs chose to bury the problem instead of looking into it. But i'll just drop the issue. If you want to look into it fine if not fine. I did my job in my report. Not a bug - Air Pockets Underwater | Empyrion – Galactic Survival - Community Forums (empyriononline.com)
Did you try it ? By the way, how do you check this on 200 different playfields at the same time ? Not sure I understand your point here. The number of playfields has nothing to do with the fact that water is done one way or another : it is generated with the terrain at game start or when loading a playfield into memory (1 at a time) and it is not rendered server side. Just show them how to do it then. Seriously, the main differeence between the two engines is that Unreal integrates systems into the core package, so they are optimized and maintained by the developers, while Unity just throws users to the forums for help or the assets store for features that are available right out of the box in Unreal, like complex water system. Just repeating myself here. Check the links. .
The point is, if no server can run the water simulation because it has to open to many playfields, its never going to even get a look in by the devs, forget simulated water. Empyrion cant afford volumetric water to be so dynamic over such a huge amount of area on the planets and multiply that by many planets you dont even need more than a few to crush any average gamers server, which are powerful servers, so its pointless, if we want it improved, it is going to be a compromise. Now thats why doing the Subn way is probably the best we can hope for because its not a performance drain. It really has absolutely nothing to do with what Unreal v Unity can do, nothing. Thats a completely pointless debate on this forum, Empyrion will always be Unity, so only what Unity can do is even worth talking about. Unity can run complex water simulations, just like many other game engines in fact, but just like all of them other game engines, across many planets, its to much for any server to do, and this is before we even drop a single player onto the map. Empyrion doesnt have a ton of headroom left to add things that use a ton of processing power, and I would argue AI is more important than water if it comes to a performance trade off. We are almost left with just a couple of options, one we are already using in game right now, our current water, or we could adopt a subn type of system and at least have flood and float abilities. I know its not as good as real simulated water, but Empyrion will never see that, ever.
Ok. Now I see what you're talking about. There's quite a difference between water that can fill emptied voxels space when drilling underwater and having waves, waterfalls and rivers. But see this : "terrains" are already like "water" regarding the fact they are constantly deformed by players (explosions, mining, flattening, etc). So tell me : what would be the difference here for "water" ? For example, mining is a game requirement and can't be avoided. Would players all dig underwater in a similar consistent and regular manner, on all playfields ? Of course not. The biggest "performance hog" regarding water is rendering it, not calculating player position relative to it or its physics (same is done for air : not rendered, simulated "aerodynamics" and drag). The point is that if you want to restrain the debate to "Only Unity And Empyrion" then you could first stop talking about how Space Engineers does this and SubNautica does that all the time. You just don't read what is posted so you don't get the point of why and how it was written, so please spare me the relevancy lessons. Oversimplification : it does not so "out-of-the-box" but that's precisely "the point" you say is not relevant so you can paste yours on top of it instead. But you know perfectly well that no program does anything : programmers are the ones making it possible. And you also know pretty well that the guys who made Empyrion made the flight dynamics, and will be the same guys directing whatever "water system" gets done in Empyrion if it does not come "out of the box" in Unity, or they will get some fancy and unmanaged "water system" from the assets store which they will have no way to fix if problems arise. ... because you are not making any distinction between "simulation" and "rendering" but I'm not going to repeat. And again : tell Eleon how Subnautica made their water system!
Dude terrain that is static, is nothing like what we are talking about here, a static voxel is not dynamic in the sense it needs to move into a flow and back. Cant be done with solid terrain, its solid. To complicate that, you cut the terrain, and water can flow down the cut you make, is completely different to just changing the shape of a voxel block and makes it even harder to do, because now water needs its own detection system to be WAY more complex, to detect changes in the terrain in realtime. Water or fluids, in Minecraft are literally the most performance heavy feature of the game. Each moving fluid voxel, is chewing out almost as much PC horse power as an actual character once it starts having to detect terrain shape and stay outside of the double meshing.. Consider a lake, every second 2 checks for terrain changes, across the entire lake for every single voxel the lake covers... Subnautica's water is not actually dynamic water that flows. It is literally a set of animations, inside the base and out, outside the base, things like character resistance help hide the illusion. INSIDE the base are nothing but simple flooding and draining animation timed to drown you with character effects, to drive home that feeling of being in water. But there is no actual dynamic water simulation, water does not flow downhill in Subn at all. And like Empyrion its water is map level based. We could tomorrow, literally add what Subn has and it works perfectly, if Eleon can code it. Subn solved the performance of underwater plant life and its vibrant colour scheme and moving plants, actual real moving plants not just animated ones, , by shortening the view distance underwater. Eleon I feel are completely capable of this, to me it doesnt seem much different to the level of coding they are already doing, or style or system or general idea, all devs are looking for solutions that dont kill performance, its why subn did it that way, and its why we should borrow that cleverness and apply it to our water.
