(AIUI) What is being asked is what aspects of the sea shader stand out compared to FG's existing implementation.
Other than more octaves of noise..hm
Main other thing seems to be change in hue of scattered light with changing geometry of sea surface (greenish). Is that what's drawing attention?
Water colour is complicated..will not stay same as in video and change by location (varies by season/sun angle/view angle). Not sure what the dominant physical processes in the video are exactly.. or if they're accounted in FG but not depicted often due to data that feeds the shader (or I haven't seen it). My understanding of what's happening: As far as I know (AIUI) water absorbs strongly in lower frequencies (red) due to OH bond(?). Light passing through clear water becomes blue as lower frequencies gets filtered out. When looking at a deep ocean light doesn't reach the bottom to get reflected like in a swimming pool with a white floor. Instead different frequencies of light gets absorbed and/or scattered back by suspended particles/sediments of varying size. These particles colour the light (like rock particles ground by glaciers which give glacial lakes distinctive colours). AIUI particles: algal blooms, sediment from rivers (worse during flooding), plankton density, and things like bioluminescent phytoplankton in tropics that glow in wakes or show on foam from breaking waves (google:
img). These have complicated scattering interactions. Sky colour is accounted for. Not sure if any are worth time or performance hit.
Based on this AFAICS The shader shows deep ocean. Sea bed doesn't play a role. AIUI The depth to a sea floor to reflect light in shallow waters isn't available until next gen scenery (or something extremely(?) complicated like creating an object on terrain OSM-style.. a beach+seabed object with a distance/direction field).
Particles may also have a profile in the water column that might effect hue of scattered light when looking at a shallow angle compared to perpendicular(?). When looking through waves there's light transmitted from the other side+light that goes in and gets scattered back. Not really sure what dominant processes that the change in hue describes. These are volumetric effects so they have to be faked somehow to avoid a raytrace of noise(??).
AFAICS it's mainly hue change that remains unmentioned(?). Some glinty-ness in the video too (glint loop
patterns are characterised by roughness which depends on sea-air temp difference as well as wind. Maybe animated thresholded noise can approximate..). Not sure if any of these are worth pain to gain.
(Never sure if it's just me, or if it's a known bug, or something I'm not setting up: Flying low over water. Adjacent parts of water have waves moving at different rates (or stationary) and directions. The seams (between different water polygons?) become visible (
seams near ENBR). Sometimes wave direction oscillates or suddenly jumps back and forth. It's noticeable. Happens with UFO and all craft IIRC.)
That's not (conceptually) possible without recreating wave noise in a FG engine lookup function in both time & space with any quirks in precision or GPU FP calculations accounted for?? At least for big waves.
Kind regards,
vnts