Water

#1 Tribes 2 water does have wave motion (though not the kind you would see crashing up on the beaches of California), but it operates much like quake2/half-life's water. Basically, each of the verticies in the mesh that make up water bob up and down opposite each other with a set frequency and amplitude. It's a decent effect, but people tend to appreciate and notice the environment mapping on the water before they see the wave motion.

On a related note, I have not yet found any way to allow a person to swim in tribes2 water. I can keep a player from sinking ( change the Armor.density value, eg LightMaleHumanArmor.density = 10 by default. Change that to 1, and they'll be equally dense with the water), but they cannot control themselves in the water unless their feet are touching the ground or they're using their jetpack.

Just food for thought,
--Timothy "Drake" Ford

#2 I was wondering if it is possible to create a water based game, racing, or some other genre...
It might not need variable water heights, but I think running down a river at high speeds and jumping off of a waterfall with a jet boost at extremely high speeds would be one very fun racing game... In some sort of small boat that you are inside, or something.
You'd probably need to program the water yourself...
Unless you could create it in MAX and add a modifier, I wonder if MAX can export wave modifiers to V12.
That would make it rather easy, then you just add a physics and collision system... You'd need to know if you are colliding with the water, or the beach/land, or both, for changes in physics...
I hope you can see how important a good MAX exporter is...

Does anyone know how many polygons the engine can handle? Many games load different areas of the world into memory as they approach them, saving memory, but costing some processing, I'd like to know if a system like that would be easy or hard to make.

#3 From what Timothy describes it shouldn't be hard to make the waves bigger and more realistic.

I really think they should have thought the density through a bit more if that was meant to be used to calculate bouyancy. But it wont be hard to change that or to add swimming. Out of curiosity have you tried making the density less than that of air :) (not sure what that is exactly but it must be around 6x10E-4) Maybe you can make a hot air balloon that way?

#4 That's a good question about density. I was going to fool around with density a little more today. (just FYI, don't set density to 0, or you go to crash city)

As for waterfalls, I can say without equivocation that the best waterfall I've ever seen in a game was Predator level one in Alien Vs. Predator. Basically, at the top of the waterfall, white-blue mist-looking particles are spawned which fall by the aid of gravity. v12's particle engine could easily support a similar water-particle emitter. The problem is too many particles will bring your framerate to its knees, so be conservative.

Don't expect the v12 engine to support water physics out of the box. From what I've seen in T2, the mesh that makes up water cannot be affected in real time (ripples, wakes etc. are out of the picture). That doesn't mean someone could add support for dynamically moving water, but it'd take some doing. There's a good article about physics-based dynamic water meshes on www.gamasutra.com, I'll see if I can find it.

--Timothy "Drake" Ford

#5 If you look straight up and jump into the water you see VERY detailed ripples and bubbles, so the surface can be dynamic. I guess it would just be a matter of adding decels to the water geometry.

#6 Ahh just re-read your post and saw you ment the mesh . my bad , havent seen any mesh deformation :P

#7 A final on that Tribes 2 lightMaleHumanArmor.density value:

btw, to edit the density value for the standard light male armor, open the console (~) and type
LightMaleHumanArmor.density = x;
where x is the new value (default 10, DO NOT SET IT TO 0) You must be server, of course. Any value above 1, and you sink in water (physics lovers can immediately assume that water has a density of 1). Any value slightly above 1 (eg. 1.1, or 1.05), and you sink slowly. Any value between 0 and 1 (NOT ZERO UNLESS YOU WANT TO CRASH), and you rise out of the water. density of 0.9 is similar to a human in water with air in his/her lungs, 0.01 is pretty funny.

Experiment, and don't go too low (eg. 0.00000001 might read as 0, and hence "welcome to crashville, population, YOU!)

Enjoy
Timothy "Drake" Ford