Improved Water with the Shorelines Beta

This is a really great update, but I’m curious how exactly it works? Is there some kind of terrain layer system behind the scenes now? It would be really cool if something like that could be used for all materials, and it could also allow different material colors and physical properties for the same material on different layers.

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Omg i have been waiting for this all my life and it is truenow

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Wow that so realistic! Well done guys!!!:star_struck:

IIrc, they actually expressed interest in changing the behavior, with a poll that I remember voting on. I can’t remember the post as it was a decent while ago, but I do remember it existing. The poor rendering isn’t set in stone.

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I’m glad you guys did this update but water really needs way more customization.

We should be able to add custom textures to it or alternatively make a whole bunch of settings which controls the water’s texture (like a procedural water shader)

As well as adding a property for underwater visibility too.

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It’s a great update!
When I selected the beta shorelines and updated my place it worked nicely. My place is a group of 3 large islands with the Seal Level set at the same height across the map.

BUT

The issue I have is that when I did some minor fixes to the shoreline necessitated by updating it didn’t realign the Water surface to level again. The shoreline Water voxels are dipped down as @Razorter showed in their pictures at the edge of the new shoreline.

I’ve looked around to see if there’s a tool that would work for this as it seems the Smooth tool should do the trick. The Smooth tool has issues with shorelines. The Paint tool doesn’t do it.

I thought that maybe I’d have to disable the Beta Shoreline feature, then save, exit, reopen the place, and then enable the Beta feature again, but no luck.

Is there any way to have this as a dynamic feature so your shoreline Water Terrain would stay at the same level when you edit the Terrain next to the sweet looking smooth shoreline and not bugger it up?

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Bro yes! This must be added! This would make my game’s beaches look AMAZING! Huge support!

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Adding on to this inclusion of such a great feature, I was wondering if we could do something like buoyancy physics, where parts that are water bound are prevented from sleeping, (maybe a boolean) due to the fact that they’re constantly bobbing up and down. This would liven up water simulation! Editing this post now, if you increase the WaterWaveSize and WaterWaveSpeed, the waterborne objects should actuate accordingly to the waves themselves!

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Hi all, thanks for the great feedback!

This definitely isn’t expected behavior. Thanks for the report. We’ll look to fix this soon.

This looks like your dynamic water creation is only writing water into empty voxels. If you also write water on top of partially full voxels, this problem should go away. This is because the new system allows water and solid to coexist in the same voxel - unless the solid is 100% full. This allows shallow water at the shores at any slope.

Please let me know whether this helps, I can clarify further if needed.

This might be a problem with the Fill tool. We’ll look into that.

Can you please clarify what you mean by that? It is not immediately clear to me from the screenshots what you are doing there.

This is not expected. Not sure exactly what you are seeing there, it could be some more complex issue. Can you please provide a simplified placefile that demonstrates your problem?

Thanks for the report! We will look into this.

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If you could explain further, that would be great.
I am currently building a column per voxel location going from bottom to top

so I start filling with solid, and once I get to the surface height, I put the partial solid, then anything above that is solid water blocks. So as is, my water voxels are always solid (1), only the surface voxel below water is a partial occupancy

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Yeah honestly to me it is quite weird how this was implemented to begin with. I assumed something like this would be a graphical tweak more than anything - Using the normal voxel-based terrain system and just ‘rendering’ the water/terrain next to it in a way that isn’t… well, terrible.
That way you could also just disable/enable it at will, as well.

But instead it’s a whole new system? Seems a bit like overkill. Maybe the described way wasn’t as viable as it sounds though. Still highly unusual that it’s such a major, fundamental change that it drastically alters how terrain water interacts with other terrain. It’s as if it’s not even part of the same Voxel grid now, based on some of the results i’m seeing in screenshots

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Build a large shallow swimming pool about waist deep. The water surface seems to ‘shrink’ as it goes back in LOD, causing it to start rendering beneath the floor of the pool.

You can also see it seems to shrink away from the fence of the pool.

image

Normally I wouldn’t care, and honestly it’s not that big a deal, but it’s a change in behavior so I’m reporting it.

Also note I adjusted the height of the floor to still allow you to see the water, it’s easy to adjust it so you can’t see the water at all:

Place file:
shallowWater.rbxl (41.5 KB)

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I cannot express to you how awesome this update is and how patiently I and the community have been waiting for it. My jaw dropped when I opened the dev forum. Thank you so much for this!

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The first image shows what happens when using the fill tool with water and ‘merge empty’ enabled, and then removing the added water with the replace tool. You can see that the occupancy for the existing grass and mud voxels are set to full, changing the shape of the terrain.

Maybe this is intended but it’s not how I expect the fill tool to work.

Also can you comment on this?

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it made it worse :confused:

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I’ve been waiting for this! My game is a VR only gun game so tiny details really matter, jagged water causes issues so hopefully this fixes them.

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The water now looks way better without the weird jagged edges near the shore!

I did not have to edit anything to make it look good fortunately

4-93e1f530fb

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Hello!

Ever since I enabled the improved shorelines, and re-placed all water using the sea-level tool. The Y-value “hitbox” of the water has been really strange, with a sort of invisible layer of water ontop of the visible.


As you can see, it changes to underwater lighting, when camera isn’t even touching the water. (This uses the default Roblox lighting for underwater effects.)

When trying to use the new shorelines with the replace tool, all hell breaks lose, lol.


Random square artifacts come out of nowhere, when trying to change the top layer of the water into air, to remove the first-mentioned issue.

Heck, I can’t even fill the square artifacts, lol. (Sea level tool uses same exact Y-value as surrounding water.)

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I have never been happier in my entire life. Guess it’s time to switch off of part water

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This is a great update in my opinion, before in my game I would try to add invisible walls to see if the water would reflect off them to make the water terrain work better. You can also tell that they have worked on the reflections of water. Thanks so much for this update.

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