Shore Generation - one new feature we wanted to add in was realistic shore waves.
The rolling waves themselves are based on the implementation in Horizon Forbidden West - the tech talk by the guys at Guerrilla Games was invaluable!
What's more interesting is that we wanted the shore to be like our ocean - infinite. This is where we ended up implementing an extremely fast function that generates the needed shore data in real-time around the player in a radius of a kilometer or so. This meant that regardless of world size a shore would now be generated where it was needed. This also meant that larger worlds would also have a higher quality shore waves.
Finally we wanted to still account for lower end hardware so we added extra modes for the shore these meant that the shore data could either be generated once (when the player character triggers its generation for a specific area) or loaded from a pre-generated shore dataset (which you can create in editor) - this last option removed all overhead from generating the shore data.
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Next up while we did have option to run a pre-baked ocean simulation, generating the needed flip-book texture required A LOT of work and external software to get it to work, so users were limited to a small library of 5 such oceans that we included.
The solution to this was to introduce an extra actor that will capture the FFT ocean simulation that you have and generate the texture based on the settings that you made. This was great as it essentially allowed users to compress and optimize THEIR oceans and potentially have them run on lower end devices. As an added bonus this also means that users can now generate a looping predictable ocean simulation that is easier to control.
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Waterline PRO 6 is available here:
https://www.fab.com/listings/0c1fc983-db84-4df3-b623-03db76d552c6
For more info check out these links:
https://www.youtube.com/@dumpsterfireproductions/videos
https://x.com/DF__Productions
Shore Final
Shore WIP
Bake down any Phillips Spectrum FFT sim into a flip-book texture to be used with the baked ocean sim mode.
Example of a pre-baked looping ocean