[Cerbera]

This topic is for people to discuss how the water.dat file will be built for MISA 0.6 and beyond.

I need control over all the water where the tunnels run underneath. Apart from that, someone else can run the water.dat or I can run it myself.

[locO G]

I see water.DAT work being separated into 3 distinct jobs.

1. The 'sea'.
2. Pools and other personal water level uses.
3. The tunnels.

We need to discuss the best way of approaching this. Please reply.

[mickarrow]

How I believe the water should be build:

1. Making a rough cutout of the island
2. Refining the rough cutout
3. Remake the parts of the refined cutout where the tunnels will go, thus making it possible to assign a different water type to these ocean tunnel pieces
4. Make the layers according to what you've build in 3
5. adding of pools, pools, etc...

I'm not sure about 5 being the last step. It might be the game reads the water.dat in a certain coordination order. I'm not sure about that though.

QUOTE

I need control over all the water where the tunnels run underneath.

Then I guess you'll be in control of all the water (give or take point 5). You can't make 4 without 3, 3 without 2 and 2 without 1. So a new problem comes foreward. Either you learn how to use the Max script, do it al by hand (that's a fun one, I tried that once), or wait for ReSpawn to release his G-tools water editor.

[steve-m]

Since it's also possible to define water triangles instead of rectangles: Did anyone ever test what happens if less than 2 edges of the triangle are parallel to the world axes? If it's possible to make arbitrary triangles, we can have whatever shapes we want rather easily. Just need to

1. create a map-sized plane in Max and cut out the rough shape of the islands
2. cut out the tunnels, but keep the shapes
3. run an optimization and/or fix some things by hand; maybe split some long triangles
4. run a maxscript to move all verts to 2*round(x/2) positions
5. fix those verts that leave gaps after moving
6. copy tunnel shapes for additional layers
7. add pools, lakes and other small water shapes by hand, taking care of the coordinates
8. run a maxscript to export the triangles to a water.dat file, taking care of vertex order if necessary
9. fix water parameters for pools and such if needed; or let the script do it

That'd be faster and easier than using an editor or doing it all by hand. And even if those triangles won't work, there are other ways to generate those axis-aligned rectangles automatically.

[mickarrow]

I believe (once again, I'm not too sure) when dealing with triangles, the game snaps the triangle to a grid(?) / coordinate to make one corner 90°. I encountered this behaviour while doing some manual test. It might be a complete different story, but that's the effect it seemed to have...

[[DRuG]Smallo]

wow smallo good job on bumping a 10 month old topic. but i am wondering if the water.dat is still being worked on? coz personally i would to use the tunnels.

[spaceeinstein]

Water.dat
Tunnel and water