As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to easily create river/ocean flows that will impact physical movement on the player.
There’s no intuitive or easy way, but flowing water is a really key element to many games.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I’d be able to create more interactive experiences with water.
On multiple occasions I have found myself sculpting a river rapids with Smooth Terrain Water and found that I have no easy way of creating current or to visually indicate that the water is moving.
Unless you make some sort of solution with parts currently. Doing this with Smooth Terrain is not possible. Water with Smooth Terrain itself is very limited. And haven’t been extended or improved upon since release. For any type of naval game at this time, you’ll constantly be bumping heads with Smooth Terrain or the Roblox Platform itself. Albeit, it’s a huge waste of time. The ability to change the direction of the water in specific regions rather than globally, or to cull water in regions so that the water isn’t see in the bottom of ships for an example would be pretty cool to see. I really hope they do something about it soon.
It used to be possible in the first version of the Terrain tools, but not in this one.
I just use BodyForce in a Part in the boat (or Character) and script it so that if that Part is in a certain zone (say position x>20 and x<50 and position z>80 and z<100) then the BodyForce will equal a certain amount to push that Part like a current would.
In Roblox Titanic terrain water is an optional visualization to make the game come together and look amazing. It is generated locally depending on settings. I get rid of the players being able to swim with Roblox animation physics in the water, in return, there is custom movement in the water using Body* objects. This allows me to simulate the exact momentum I want while the ship appears to be moving.
What would this feature request allow me to do differently than the system I have already setup?
Would we be able to change the direction of the “sine wave water” to make it seem like the current is going in a different direction, or is that mathematically impossible?
It’s worth noting this used to be a feature of the older terrain system, prior to Smooth Terrain.
I’m pretty sure the smooth terrain system would need tweaks to allow for extra metadata (in this case, water direction), but if that’s feasible then I’d love to see this.
Of course, editing direction was really hard.
Any successful orientation editing system will require a killer editor to make it good.
Probably some flow field editor and a ball editor like terrain.
Would be nice if we could impart wind too.
Agreed.
Since you mentioned wind, I think it might be a good idea to generalise the concept of moving water and wind into some kind of ‘fluid motion’ that can be applied to both air and water.
Yeah, would love a vector field force that is cheap to apply.
Sorry for the bump, but supporting this feature as it could benefit on users who work on terrain and have the water property become a bit more detailed in some cases.
Anyway, having a “lazy” river onto the Engine would be kind of nice to have as it would be better to create and set up instead of using the default water settings to replicate that which would work, but I rather have a system in place to replicate real-world actions of water or ground terrain if it is possible.
Would be nice to add lazy rivers to some games that use water, I would use it myself. 