Improved Water with the Shorelines Beta

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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Great improvement! Smooth upgrade.

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Hello, i just enabled the new feature and even though I don’t have water in my map, I’m still getting these visible terrain “tearing”.

The “ripped” terrain seems to be separated in squares around the player, where the squares connect is where the “tearing” appears.

It might have something to do with whatever Level Of Detail (streaming) system Roblox uses, if you try to get up close to these “tearing” artifacts they disappear and reappear further away at a relative distance from the player where at these “square” intersections as seen above.

I also tried to smooth those edges form a distance with terrain tools but it just makes it look worst.

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This was my main issue with terrain water, and now we have the option to fix it!

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Excited about the potential this feature has! It’s going to “age up” what Terrain is and make water even better than what we have today.

I’m experimenting on Jailbreak and finding two issues. I can probably get around the first one using blue water-colored parts beneath the surface. The 2nd one feels more like an error.

  1. Shallow water terrain like rivers or small lakes disappear from a medium distance:

  2. Terrain LOD behavior seems to have changed. It’s common to see the void and unconnected voxels only with Shorelines Beta. The file without shorelines doesn’t show this.

Edit: Looks like others in this thread have covered both issues including the LOD tearing.

Double Edit: Problem #1 is easy to circumvent, at least for Jailbreak, and Shorelines enable a proper way for our vehicles to climb out of water. This is gamechanger. I would happily ship this today. Check my next reply for more details.

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I’m back moments later. Ignore my gut reactions.

  1. I was able to fix my rendering issues by removing parts we can afford to remove that we previously had underneath all of our water. All water now renders very nicely.

  2. With that said, terrain tearing still exists. But not nearly as noticeable in public servers with my camera set to a high FOV.

Now, my favorite part. Finally we can have ramps made of terrain to help cars get out of water. No more parts (our part-made-ramps were causing the rendering issues) and players can climb out of water anywhere after some manual work.


This is fantastic.

I would happily ship Shorelines in this current state to Jailbreak. Even with the terrain tears.

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So how did you do the cars going up the beach previously? I never encountered render issues. take this part of the map for example


In the past you were ALWAYS able to get onto the land from the water

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Been working on an island game for years. I can’t even tell you how many hours of editing I’ve done looking to fix what I could of this. In one click with this update it fixed it all. Don’t know if I should lol or cry. Great update! While you’re right here working on this maybe add fome as an option …

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