Back to the Village for Some Fresh Air (Part IV) – WATER!!

Hello everybody!
This week’s update is all about broken water effects and my attempts to restore things to the original GC/Wii look (as much as possible).

I’m not sure how… but I got some decent results! 😀 I was even able to adjust some water sections to behave more dynamically than in the GC/Wii version of the game.

I’ve edited both the water animation textures and the data containing the water effect configurations.

Please note that this is not about editing a single file that will have impact on water throughout the entire game. Every stage has its own water effect configuration and textures, and it must be calibrated room by room. This is a good thing because if adjustments had to be made globally, the results might work for some rooms but not others. But since everything is room-specific, we can optimize the results for each area!

Anyway, this is a 2005 water effect, and it has a lot of limitations. So what you’ll see in the video is (for now) the best we can get. For example, the ripple radius / size is tied to the water effect surface. The bigger the water area, the bigger the ripple will look. This is also the reason that the Lake water wave area is delimited inside a defined square (you may not have noticed this before). Beyond the square you can see some weird texture distortions (a simplified version of the water effect). The main water effect is inside the square and if it was bigger, the ripples would look gigantic!

All these limitations were already in the original. The “broken” part of the effect (and it’s been broken since the PS3/X360 HD ports) is the specular texture mapping over the water plane. It’s all messed up, as you can clearly see in the first cave puddles in the video below.

And that’s all! This time I’m only posting a video since the differences can’t be captured with screenshots. I hope you like it! Try not to fall asleep listening to that music for 13 minutes. XD

Have a nice weekend!!