Currently, the Roblox water color is affected by the clock time. While this provides a nice effect for a lot of games, it does not for all, and in our case, limits how creative we can be and how good looking our environments can be underwater.
We are currently working on an expansive diving mechanic for our game, using some neat scripting to make water darker the deeper you go. With this, we expect the water’s color to remain around what we set it as.
However, with Roblox’s time-based WaterColor adjustment, the color varies wildly based on the time of the day, creating very undesired effects such as these:
We are trying to create a cold, deep and frozen-ish water environment, and the time-based adjustment makes it seem muddy and tropical at times, which goes completely against what it’s intended to be.
The current workaround for this is to make the client set the clock time instead of the server, so that we can set the time to 12 or other good looking hour in the client. This is obviously not ideal and requires changing a core component of the game.
The effect is great, don’t get me wrong. It just should be optional, as since it is forced right now, it limits imagination.
I understand this may not be a high priority issue for Roblox all things considered, but some sort of communication about whether this will be changed at all would be very appreciated.
As it stands, making games or mechanics revolving Roblox water is visually unfeasible when a day / night cycle is involved.
Our team might have to resort to creating a custom water system since there is no way to go around this.
Big agree, my night sky involves a purple moon and purple ambience but the skybox itself is orange, so I’ve matched the water color to reflect the sky. This results in the nighttime water fog becoming a completely disgusting color that contrasts the sky quite awfully. As a result I had to work a special case into my ambience system to change the water color at night so it’s less horrible. Configuring this is terrible though because the night color is darker than is actually set, so finding the right color is trial and error.
I think cases like this should have the color modeled as a colorsequence that aligns with the time of day, then we can specify complex gradients. The same can be said for Lighting and the colors the sky takes on as dusk/dawn happens.
