Since my last dev log I’ve mostly been working on the water’s visuals. First thing I did was to rewrite the screen space fluid rendering implementation and tuned it a bit to make it look way better than before and less like a bunch of stacked balls and I also added realistic looking refractions too. Then I added proper shadows to the scene, which made stuff look more alive. This bumped the visuals up a lot.
Then I worked on caustics. This was one of those features that instantly made the water look ten times better. This took a bit of time to get right but eventually I got it to work and it looks good. After that, I added foam to make the water look less flat and blobby. The water, in general, waswas too perfect and so I added noise to the water to fix that.
With these changes, there was a noticeable loss of performance so I had to work on that. Along the way I also cleaned up some of the code especially the GUI control panel thingy since it was getting too extensive so I cut down a lot of things.
Then I finally added model support. Before you could only use basic shapes like squares, spheres etc. Now I can load in model files, and use them in the simulation which is really cool. There was also this weird bug where objects would disappear when you switched them around but after a bunch of changes in my code I finally fixed the bug. I also fixed other bugs like water kind of acting weird with the boat spawned which too took quite a bit of time to fix.
Next I want to do some scene polish like better background, etc and then finally audio. I might also work some more on the object collision physics since I intentionally kept them really simple but I might not. Depends on how lazy I am I guess.