Better Oceans

The game's sea is a flat blue plane with two sine waves in it. This gives it a surface.

Ripples that travel with the swell and never repeat. Sun glitter across the chop. Long lanes of wind reaching to the horizon. Surf that washes up the sand and drags back. Water that goes warm at sunset because the sky did, and grey under a storm because the light did.

What changes

• A real surface. Eight scales of drifting detail, none of them sharing an axis, a size or a speed - so there is no pattern to find and no tile to spot, however long you stare at it. Calm patches and rough patches, hundreds of metres across, so no two stretches look the same.
• It is lit by the game. Torches, lanterns, the sun, the moon, fog, shadows, reflections and the weather all reach the water the same way they reach everything else. Hold a torch at the water's edge and it lights the water.
• It behaves like water. Almost no reflection with the sun overhead, almost total reflection when the sun is low - which is why a real ocean is dark and blue at noon and blazes at sunset.
• A shoreline. The mod measures the seabed around you, so the surf knows where the sand is: a thin band of bubbles at the waterline that runs up the beach and back with the swell.

It does not change how anything floats

The game works out where the water is with a pair of sine waves, and every boat, bobber and floating crate rides on them. This mod keeps those numbers to the letter and reproduces the same waves, adding detail only in how they are lit. It checks this itself on startup and says so in the log.

Best with Living Skies

These two are built for each other. The sea is lit by the game's own light, so whatever Living Skies is doing overhead arrives on the water by itself:

• Sunrise and sunset - the ocean warms with the sky and the sun lays a path of broken light across it.
• Storms - the sea goes grey and hard as the cloud rolls in, and tears up into whitecaps.
• Night - dark water under stars, and the moon on the swell.

Neither needs the other. But a moving sky over a dead sea, or a living sea under a fixed noon, is half a view - together they are one.

Get it here: Living Skies

Making it yours

Set TuningMenu = true in yoxi.htf.water.cfg and press F9 in game for a panel of sliders - colour, ripples, glitter, foam, haze - and the sea changes as you drag. Save keeps your look. Off by default.

More from Yoxi

• Torch - a real torch item: fire in your fist, light and moving shadows
• Better Islands - three of the five islands rebuilt by hand
• CustomIslands Loader - the mod that runs custom islands
• CustomIslands Mapmaker Kit - build your own islands
• Living Skies - day-night cycle plus storms, rain, lightning and thunder. Pairs with this one
• HTF Day and Night - the calm-sky day-night cycle on its own

Built by Yoxi.

Changelog

2.1.0

• You can see through the water now, for real. Stand in the shallows and look down: your hands, your feet, the sand, rocks, dock legs and the boat's hull are all there through the surface, bent a little by the ripples and tinted by how much water you are looking through. The old version painted a guess at the bottom; this one shows what is actually there. Looking along the surface still gives you the sky. Six metres of visibility by default (SeeThisFarDown), and "See through the surface", "Refraction" and "Fades out this close" on the F9 panel.
• The water gets out of the way of things it touches. Where there is only a hand's depth between the surface and something solid - the inside of the boat, your legs - the sheet fades out, the way the original does. The boat looks like it floats again.
• The game draws its water in a step of its own, just before the sky. The pipeline photographs the scene just after the sky, which meant the water was in its own photograph. The mod nudges that step to run just after the photograph. Nothing else changes.
• The sea now stays on the game's own layer and queue, so the boat's hull mask and everything else the game does around its water keep working.
• The minimap and the inventory photos use the painted bottom, since a camera drawing to a texture has no photograph of its own.

2.0.2

• The sea takes the fog. Unity strips fog out of shader bundles, so the sea had shipped with none: islands faded into the distance while the water around them stayed deep blue, and far islands looked greyed out. The sea now works the game's fog out for itself, on the same view depth the islands get, so the two fade together.
• The sea reads the fog at the moment each camera renders, after the game and any sky mod have had their say, so it can never be a frame behind the sky. Pairs with Living Skies 1.0.7, whose fog now wears the colour of the horizon.

2.0.1

• New icon.
• README: how to use the Shaders screen, the three qualities, and a note on how this mod is made.

2.0.0

The sea moves now.

• A real swell. Up to forty wave trains from a JONSWAP ocean spectrum, fanned across the wind. Wave height, length, count, spread, speed and steepness are all in the config. Calm by default.
• Waves that respect the shore. The seabed survey now drives the waves as well as the foam. Waves slow and bunch up in the shallows, turn to arrive parallel to the beach, wrap around headlands, grow as the water thins and break when it gets too shallow to hold them. Spilling surf on gentle beaches, plunging surf on steep ones, and the water runs up the sand and drains back.
• Boats float on the new waves. The game's own water-height lookup is taught the same swell, so everything that floats rides exactly what is drawn. Nothing is sent over the network.
• See into the water. Clear over the sand, blue where it drops away, from the measured depth.
• A better surface. Ripples that run with the wind instead of isotropic grain, ridged crests, fine glitter, and the sky mirrored at low angles. The plastic look is gone.
• Foam with a body. Whitewater has a bumpy, matte, lit surface and a darker lip. Whitecaps are wind streaks, not round dots.
• A Shaders screen in the pause menu. Press Escape: a Shaders button sits above Main Menu. Switch the whole mod, the waves, the surf, the wake, the water lights or the sky reflection on and off, live. Saved to the config.
• Three qualities. Classic (the original Better Oceans shader), Realistic (the new sea, trimmed to run well, the default) and Ultra (nothing trimmed: forty waves, a half-metre mesh, a finer survey). Switch in the menu, no restart.
• Faster. The Realistic sea costs about a third of what the first version of it did per pixel, with the same look.
• The sea mesh is rebuilt at one vertex per metre so the waves are smooth rather than faceted.

Fixes

• Random rings and discs of foam in open water. The seabed survey was reading the player, the boat and any submerged step as a beach edge. It no longer does.
• Turning the mod off on an island left a frozen copy of the mod's own shader in place, which could look like the sky blinking. Off now puts the game's real water back.
• The background clouds no longer snap colour when the sky changes.
• The lit shader and the classic shader each keep their own tuning file, so tuning one no longer wrecks the other.

1.1.0

• Boat wake. Boats churn the water behind them and it fades away over a few seconds. The wake is real disturbed water rather than a decal: it goes white, it roughens the surface, and the edges of the lane heap up and catch the light like waves. Every boat on the water leaves one, including other players', with no network traffic - each game works it out from where the boats already are.
• Wake length and width are configurable, and both, along with the surface break-up, are on the F9 tuning panel.
• Torches light the water. Hold one at the water's edge and the sea lights up around you, the same as the sand does. Lanterns and any other nearby light do the same. Before this the water only ever saw the sun and the moon.

1.0.0

First release.

• A new ocean surface: eight scales of drifting, warping detail that never repeats, plus calm and rough patches hundreds of metres across.
• Lit by the game's own renderer, so torches, lanterns, fog, shadows, reflections and the weather all reach the water.
• Physically correct reflection - dark and blue under a high sun, alight when the sun is low.
• Sun glitter that widens with distance instead of fading, so the far water reads as a silver sheet rather than flat colour.
• Light scattering up through the swell toward the sun.
• Wind streaks running to the horizon.
• Shoreline surf measured off the real seabed: a thin band of bubbles at the waterline that washes up the sand and back with the swell.
• Foam that is rough water rather than white paint, so it behaves under any light at any hour.
• Buoyancy untouched: the game's own wave maths is reproduced exactly, and the mod verifies this against the game on startup.
• Optional in-game tuning panel (F9), off by default.