Hello all,
Just having some “Fun with Ships”
I was answering some questions on the forum and ran across a question having to do with buoyancy (probably on a hover craft or something. I don’t remember now) and got to researching how to make it work and be really cool looking. I looked high and low and even found demos and ultimately found the source of how they made a hovercraft work. Something like adding a sine wave to a height to make it look like it was hovering… That wasn’t good enough for me though… So I set off to rekindle an old project where I made a patch of waves and sought out a way to make it truly viable in the 3d world.
What I found was a formula to simulate waves. So I got to thinking, how do I apply this to a mesh. I know I can make a grid, I know where all the points of the grid are. So I summarized that all I then had to do was to make an array of grids and call it water.
There was a release a while back by someone who made “infinite” water, which is simply a series of grids that did the wave effect and moved along with you. What I wanted was a bit different. I wanted a series of grids that was static, but LOD’ed themselves when you were near or far. Worse, I wanted to fill the top of a box with these grids and have the work as if they were a solid piece of water.
So, Fun with Ships is a demo I created to play with this concept. It features LODing, auto hiding water patches that conserve as much processing power as I can find. The boats and ships in the demo all use buoyancy control points and do not rely on the geometric wave data at all.
Ships Featured:
Spanish Galleon
Oil Tanker
Box
Fun with Ships Demo
I hope you guys have fun with it. It is very much a “work in progress” demo.
Model Source
Wave Math Source
This kind of sucks! I can’t jump. I get the galleon caught up on one of the green hills at the top of the island but there’s no jump key. WTF is up with that?!?
Apart from the galleon handling like a jet ski this is a really neat demo. 
Also, inversion, I haven’t managed to get the galleon to do a barrel roll. Is that possible or do you have range limiters in it?
Yeah, sorry, no “jump” feature on a ship… imagine that. I modeled the controls after GTA’s boats, so yeah, it works much like a jet ski or speed boat. It would be pretty boring waiting on the wind. lol
it turns way to fast and the waves are to big, but apart from that evrythings great you should turn this into a proper game
Did I mention it needs jump feature.
Maybe it could be like a pirate simulator modeled on the Oregon Trail.
“Your cabin boy has died of scurvy and dysentery.”
I kind of like the idea of a jetski/galleon. You could have a large ogre of hill giant stood on the poop deck (or even a giant pig on the poop deck, boy! there’s an ancient reference to a MUD, bet you cannot find that on Google!) guiding the galleon like a jetski.
“You entire crew has caught dysentery and scurvy.”
“Dude, what are you doing? Just buy all canon balls with your money and shoot water buffalo for food!”
There is a point to the RESET button here. And and an even bigger point… These are random waves generated by a series of 4-7 wave data tables. These are all customizable. Different lengths, speeds and heights are all achievable. Since they are adjustable at runtime, you could easily go from a calm sea to rough without stopping and reloading anything.
The next actual step has nothing to do with gameplay. I need to figure out how to stitch my geometry together. There are big gaps that need to be handled better.
The demo is more for water than ships… lol
So no jump function then? 
Very fun 
had to