BetterOceans

Better Oceans

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

it a surface, a swell, a shoreline, and a menu to run it from.

Waves that come in from the open sea, turn to face the beach, stand up

in the shallows and break. Foam that runs up the sand and drains back.

Water you can see into. Ripples that travel with the wind and never

repeat. Sun glitter across the chop. Boats leave a wake. And a Shaders

screen in the pause menu where you switch any of it on or off, live.

What changes

• A real swell. Forty wave trains from a proper ocean spectrum

(JONSWAP, the one oceanographers use), long and short, fanned across

the wind. No two waves alike and nothing that repeats.

• Waves that know where the land is. The mod surveys the seabed

around you. Waves slow down in the shallows and bunch up, turn to

arrive parallel to the beach and wrap around headlands, grow as the

water gets thin, and break when it gets too thin to hold them.

Gently sloping beaches get spilling surf, steep ones get plunging

surf, and the water runs up the sand and drains back.

• The boat rides it. Everything that floats sits on exactly the

water that is drawn: the mod teaches the game's own water-height

lookup the same waves, so boats, bobbers and crates ride the swell

with no desync. The mod checks the two agree on startup and says so

in the log.

• You can see through it. Stand in the shallows and look down: your

hands, the sand, rocks, the 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. Clear over the sand, blue

where the seabed drops away. Looking along the surface gives you the

sky instead, as real water does.

• A real surface. Eight scales of drifting detail that run with the

wind the way real water does, ridged crests, fine glitter, a sky

mirrored at low angles. Calm patches and rough patches, hundreds of

metres across.

• Foam with a body. Whitewater is bumpy, matte and lit like the

layer of bubbles it is, with a darker lip on the water it rides.

Whitecaps are wind streaks torn along the sea, not white dots.

• 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.

• Boats leave a wake. White, roughened, heaped at the edges, fading

after a few seconds. Every boat on the water, not only yours.

How to use it

Install it and play. The defaults are a calm, clear, tropical sea.

Press Escape and there is a Shaders button in the pause menu,

just above Main Menu. It opens a screen in the game's own style:

• Better Oceans: On / Off. The whole mod. Off puts the game's own

water back on the spot.

• Quality: Classic / Realistic / Ultra. See below.
• Waves: On / Off. The swell. Off is a flat sea, like the original

game but with the new surface.

• Surf and shore foam: On / Off. Breakers, swash and the foam line.
• Boat wake: On / Off.
• Water lights: On / Off. Whether torches and lamps light the sea.
• Sky reflection: On / Off. Whether the sky is mirrored in the water.
• Back.

Everything is live, and everything is saved to the config so it stays

that way next time.

The three qualities

• Classic. The first Better Oceans: the shader that works out its own

light. Lighter on the GPU. No spectrum swell, because that shader

cannot draw one and the boat must float on what is drawn.

• Realistic. The default. The spectrum sea, trimmed so it runs well:

around three times cheaper per pixel than the first version of it,

with the same look.

• Ultra. The same sea with nothing trimmed. Forty waves instead of

twenty four, a half-metre mesh instead of one metre, a finer seabed

survey, and the shader measuring everything everywhere instead of

skipping open water. For PCs that can take it.

Making it yours

Everything the menu does and a lot more is in yoxi.htf.water.cfg:

• [Swell] - WaveHeight (0.28 by default; 1.0 is a