Here is the thread to announce Smart Water PRO. I will post some teasers here until the final release.
This first teaser, show one of the shader of Smart Water PRO named Open GL 2 PRO 1. This shader is compatible OpenGL2 (and in fact would work on any computer running shader 2.0). That means, the shader fits within the 64 instructions limit. It is a 2 pass shader that is relatively quick.
Smart Water PRO features 2 OpenGL2 shader and the others are only running using shader 3/OpenGL 3 GPU architecture. This is useful to support older PC/MAC.
Smart Water PRO will be an addon to Smart Water Basic and will cost the same as Smart Water Mobile, uses the same parameters as the other versions of Smart Water and is of course is compatible with Smart Water Mobile basic (same parameters matches the closest possible result automatically on all platforms.)
What kind of an overhead are we looking at here? After buying Smart Water Mobile for the 2.0 shaders and finding that it got 8fps on iPad1/iPhone4 devices I’m not all that inclined to drop more money into this product. Not trolling … Just my personal concern.
Smart Water PRO takes almost no overhead on my tests. 1 FPS max on a I7 720 with NVIDIA GTX 260M mobile GPU.
Smart Water has several shaders, the OpenGL2 shaders are slow on iPad 1 because of the iPad 1, there is no way around. Shaders in general are slow on these devices. Smart Water has 2 OpenGL 1 shaders, that are more simplier shaders that will work on older devices like iPad1, iPhone 3GS etc… and they are quick, but do not use the OpenGL2 ones which are a bit sophisticated for these devices.
There is no way you can get the OpenGL2 shaders quicker than Smart Water on these devices, it is an hardware limitation, but what people are doing is that they put an option to switch to the expensive shaders. So if the customer have a quick device (iPad 2 and iPhone 4S) he can use the OpenGL2 water, but if he does not have these device, he can use a fully compatible shader, that will have almost no impact on the game speed.
When you market your game you make the pictures with the OPENGL 2 shader. If you want beautiful water on OpenGL2 with an iPad 1 for example, you have no choice. What other option do you have? No water? I don’t see your point here. Do you know a great looking water OpenGL2 that is blazing fast on iPad 1???
Smart Water OpenGL2 takes 1 or 2 FPS only on iPAD2 and iPhone4S. Think about the future. And also Smart Water can switch on the fly from one shader to another, and even can adjusts automatically using the right shader on the right platform at startup if you want.
Sure there is underwater, this is the underwater for the mobile platform. I am still working on the underwater for the PRO version, but it will be much better, because I have no limits due to the mobile hardware.
I think this problem is related to the free Ocean shader I released a while ago. Smart Water is not the same shader, there is not such a problem with Smart Water as far as I know. You can open a ticket at http://www.unity3dx.com if you have more info I do not have yet and I will investigate the mater.
Will this version also fix the stretching problem along the equator when applying it to spherical geometry?? SWB still has this problem and its very difficult to cover up.
This is just a teaser, it is too early to answer to these questions for sure. As far as the speed for the shader used in this demo, it takes almost nothing on my i7 (not even a frame) and can be used on mobile platforms (iPad2 and iPhone4S = 1 FPS). In this demo there is no waves and no vertex animations. I will add vertex animation for close look of the water in another shader with smooth transition between the 2 shaders depending on the distance. But of course, vertex animation is costly and will not work on mobile platforms (maybe in the next generation of iPhone? who knows?)
Thanks Jaimi, I was about to say the same, but you was faster than me
The story about the delay is that what is on the video, I lost it in a disk crash… It was a lot of work, (months) with a lot of smart unique idea to get this result… I had to do it again from scratch, which I did, eventually even better…
The shader here is using render to texture and is PRO only… the video I posted Here http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/175599-Smart-Water-2-it-is-coming is a lower quality shader but have more tweaking features…it is the Open GL 3 for Unity basic version… video for the PRO is in the making.
I am still working on the packaging (video, photos and scene examples) for the PRO version of the shader, which is now working and finished. But I take my time to do the things right and without compromise and I have also to work for a living which sometime takes me 100% of my time for several days…
Is this a new add on or upgrade of existing smart mobile water? I bought the old smart water mobile, it’s not really useable, and there’s no updates for a while.
