Occlusion on water

Still working on the occlusion on the water…

The major problem is that this is very render-pipeline dependent. I have to render the water in the depth/normal pass, or else I won’t have decals, so I’m kind of stuck with what I can do with it…

So, I decided to try a different approach: use stippled alpha to show the occlusion, hoping it will make more evident that the player is immersed in the water. The results are not very good, but I think they’re promising:

It flickers a lot when the player moves, but that’s probably the way I’m doing the stippling in the shader, and I think the stipple pattern is not very good (it renders only on odd pixels). I might need to use a stipple texture to modulate this… I can also use full-blown alpha on this step:

It might also work for the intended purpose, and doesn’t require much tweaking, unlike stipple alpha which I think shows a bit better the occlusion but needs some tweaks to get right (especially in low resolutions).

Anyway, I’m still going to play a bit more with this before moving on the shader quality stuff (especially for AO on the Mac), and why the loader doesn’t show up in OpenGL/Release build… Then I’ll probably be ready to send over this to the artist so he can play with the game a bit and get a feel so he can work on the UI, which comprises most of the remaining work on the game (maybe being out of work can really push the game forward)…

Now listening to “Absolute Dissent” by “Killing Joke”