Water flowing in lower-fidelity settings

Gungriffon Geona

     So this is something I've had a hard time figuring out for a good while now. it seems like something that was avoided in alot of games in the PS2/Xbox/GC era, but a few games and some mods from the era seemed to try and solve it. 

     Does anyone here have any content for doing running water effects within those specs? I'm trying to figure out how to do rapids, waterfalls, turbulent ripples and such without resorting to reflection maps since those would kind of break the look I'm doing.

I got particularly inspired to finally try and solve this after watching this video and watching the drain field.

Things I understand so far:

• using multiple texture layers scrolled at different speeds.
• vertex colors and/or masks for changing intensity in certain areas
• stuff with particles??? (I am bad with particles oh boy)
• using textures or vertex color effects to create water caustics

     I actually managed to solve some of this before, once in a 2D game using scrolling noise in a shader to do pixel art ripples for the ocean, and I also figured out dealing with beach waves. the underwater caustics is also fairly well documented on how it's done.

Running water seems to need a different approach from these though.

     The problem I'm having is I don't have any examples I can properly tear apart and study the textures and models. Thus I'm kinda stuck without the "aha" moment I'm looking for where I can get it working myself.

Does anyone here have any advice or examples? most of the discord spaces where people talk about low-spec graphics have had nothing to say or simply don't know.

dimwalker

I think you got it figured out already - a shader with several layers mixed or even just animated UVs would do the trick.
I can only add that manually distorting UVs can imitate local turbulence / water flowing around rocks. 

Klunk

not flowing per se but interesting water effects in Baldurs Gate on the ps2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu1HU0QGsWg&ab_channel=Farooqbhai

poopipe

Defining what you mean by low spec would help.  There's a thread on here somewhere that details how water was handled in that Zelda game with the boat but that's extremely rudimentary 

Gungriffon Geona

poopipe said:

Defining what you mean by low spec would help.  There's a thread on here somewhere that details how water was handled in that Zelda game with the boat but that's extremely rudimentary 

Mainly I mean texture-only work, maybe with some slight reflection map shenannigans if needed. it doesn't have to be pixel-perfect stuff or anything.

I know that there was an example of a flowing river in a game, but I cannot remember for the life of me, so this is close enough to what I'm talking about.

Eric Chadwick

I have some explanations in my sketchbook, very low spec from a mobile game done in Unity, might help?

https://polycount.com/discussion/160691/sketchbook-eric-chadwick

Gungriffon Geona

Eric Chadwick said:

I have some explanations in my sketchbook, very low spec from a mobile game done in Unity, might help?

https://polycount.com/discussion/160691/sketchbook-eric-chadwick

This is fantastic! It's almost exactly what I was looking for, thank you!