Hello everyone. As of right now the water simulation does not move if you dig below the immediate shoreline. If I make a tunnel to a lake, near the edge of the lake the water is static. So if I go before that point I have no effects of being underwater and when I go past that point the effects of underwater happen. There is a solution that will make it for now work with empyrions situation and will make it easier as a player to make underwater bases between lands and connected through tunnels. First though I need to explain how to make a level in Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. When you start the map making process in SCFA (Supreme Commander Forged Alliance) you can set the water level, how high you want to make it. In this case, we can start out with the land at 10 meters and the sea level at 20 meters. Now I can raise landmass to be 26 meters later on in the map creation. I can also make a lake by creating a small circle and lowering that land in that area to 9 meters. How does this help empyrion in any way? Well in Empyrion we can raise and lower land. Well sometimes we want to create a tunnel to a lake, as mentioned in the example prior. With this solution we no longer have the issue of having a small static body of water. Instead if I were to dig down to below sea level prior to the lake body of water and then dig to the lake via tunnel, it would be totally underwater the entire way. Alternatively I could dig down right before the lake and their would be no static body of water ruining the immersion. There would be no static bodies of water that would ruin the immersion of this game (because whenever you dig to sea level or below you will get water). What this also means is on lava planets, you could change the sea level into the lava level. Then literally you could start building a base into the lava. Maybe make a gas planet that has floating islands (by raising the sea/gas level insanely high?), though then empyrion devs would need to really take time to make better fluid movements in these environments. Airtightness, (or whatever it is called that protects people in spacestations) would defenitely become paramount though. Thank you for listening.
Its not letting me add this via edit, but the end point of this thread is.. In the end, if we can make the planets work on this kind of system on galaxy creation, it might have empyrion in the short term for having better water simulation than it has now. Fluid dynamics would be great, but this is just another alternative that is less taxing on dedicated servers and on empyrion in general. If a mod can add that to original post, thank you.
In Empyrion there is a water/land ratio set in the playfield.yaml file, and when the playfield is loaded in game (when a player enters the playfield for the first time) the ratio is set once and for all by the SSG (Solar System Generator) which is also the application that creates terrains following a list of parameters. After the terrain has been generated the water is set in its locations and will not move from there. Other games have other water/ terrain systems, and most of the time non-deformable terrain, or pre-modeled terrains in an editor and "compiled" with lighting / decorations, which then can not be modified in game. Actually, we may be able to simulate little ponds and waterfalls with artefacts (decals geometry) but this only lasts for as long as players don't start messing with the terrain around, which would then reveal the illusion.
