We've got a lot of comments that our waves have spikes in trailer. Yes, it is. But it's not a bug at all, it's a "feature" of optimization for low-end PCs. Of course, it shouldn't be in trailer as you expect to see the maximum of game quality here, but it happend and I decide to clear it.
Today SeaCraft works on low-end PCs with good quality enouth. It means that ocean has less polygons when you play thus. Nevertheless if you have a modern PC you'll see the cool and smooth image - because the power of Unreal Engine is with us! :) Anyway, the quality of low-end pic will be improved and "spikes" will be fixed too.
I've attached few screens:
And a simple video here:
Compression killing the details but I hope that main idea is clear. But please don't look at ship's physics! We'll show our new physics model with proper ship vs. waves interaction soon.
WOW :O just... WOW :O
Waves you say? :D
Looking great!
Can the waves be tessellated for DX11 users? If they can't, I'd recommend it since you'd be able to easily optimize performance on waves by having a low-poly sea, then dynamically tessellating the areas where large amounts of polygons are needed (i.e. water displacement like in the video). I suspect you might be able to do something similar under DX9 using a custom LOD system for the ocean.
Today we don't use DX11 features yet as there are no significant goals to use it in our game. Maybe we'll implement them later (including ocean DX11 tesselation).
So pretty much the reason Lara Croft had really sharp boobs in the first Tomb Raider game, low graphics. I'm so excited to play this, already got my vote on Steam Greenlight.
What the hell. This is the most beautiful thing I've seen this day.