by flycanarias » Sat Nov 05, 2016 4:33 pm
Well, I had the same thought of creating different landclasses for coastal regions... But that would, apart from the massive time and work effort, lead to the problem that a change by weather would be difficult, right?
After my unsatisfying question, how other sims do it, I asked myself, how nature is doing it!
After some research on the net, I know that the time when a wave breaks is dependent on its heigh and the depth of the sea below it...
In general, when the wave is higher than the sea below, it breaks, and shows the foam we'd like to implement.
But as waves are just textures and shaders right now, we can not get any waves' heigh.
Some further research brought me to the point that, physically, the waves get higher due to the wind! The stronger the wind is, the higher are the waves.
And that leads me to the fact, that: the higher the waves are, the farer they break from the coast!
Now my conclusion: The wind that puts our airplane into turbulence, is the same "thing" that indicates where a wave breaks. And the ocean depths we need to give the water these beautiful colours, the ones we take from OceanDepth, are, just like Johan told us, those responsible for wave breaking on the other hand.
What does all this mean?
We don't need landclasses, but we do the following:
We connect the weather (wind) with the ocean depth, and set this as a piece of code.
E.g. At this specific strength of wind, "xx" average waves are "xy" high. (This data is freely available from different research studies, so this won't be a huge problem...) Now we tell the program to compare the "fictional" wave heigh to the ocean below it. Kind of like: "Wave heigh < Ocean Depth = no shader" or "Wave heigh > Ocean depth = display the white foam shader on the sea"
So we wouldn't make it dependant on data the program can't deal with, but with data we already have.
Now I don't really know how the OceanDepth Database "colours" the water, if it implements the depth as a parameter, or how it works.
But if we don't have the parameter, we replace the condition "depth" by the colour...
Can this maybe work?
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