All new places are already using Shorelines, so no need to do the upgrade 
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Is it possible that your place is already using Shorelines? The upgrade isn’t available in the menu once it was already applied.
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Thank you! Our team is looking into this.
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I’m not sure, but I had no Studio update and the water looks the same. After comparing with the videos of shorelines and old water in the main post of this topic, the behaviour I’m seeing looks more like shorelines when examining the water. It is automatic for published places? Is there any quick way I can check?
Edit: I did a bit more research and found out the WaterWaveSpeed and WaterWaveHeight are likely indicators of shorelines. I think the upgrade was automatic as I found these under the Terrain object.
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The hitboxes can mislead, and it looks bad because it does not rise towards the shore like in real life.
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I will address multiple concerns in this thread by points, but just so I do not repeat myself, let me first present some crucial details in the Shorelines update that have not been entirely obvious:
- The main changes definitely are that (a) water was “unwelded” from the solids and that (b) one voxel can contain both water and a solid. Those were crucial to be able to create smooth shallow shores/beaches. But that is of course not all.
- Yes, water now internally automatically “expands” a bit to the sides. But it mainly does that when solids are present on the side. It has to, because the water voxels (just like e.g. sand) are inherently “rounded”. Without this, if you filled water in a pool with vertical sides, it would curve downward at the walls. Water has to be “rounded” otherwise one couldn’t make nice rounded waterfalls and smoothly flowing rivers. It also expands a bit downwards to fill bottoms of pools.
- Besides all the above, the old water had a serious bug in how it handled the y coordinate of the top surface. Any water surface was previously always 2 studs (half a voxel) lower than a solid surface of the same values. This helped hide the buggy look of water at least at more “steep-ish” shores. However, since a voxel vertex cannot be allowed to run outside of the voxel’s box (so as not to cause overlaps etc) - it had to be clamped to the voxel box after the 2 stud offset. The somewhat unfortunate result of this was that some vertical positions of water top surface were just NOT POSSIBLE. I.e, for several two different voxel values, you’d get the same level of water.
This element #3 - and the fact that the shorelines update had to fix this bug - is probably what is causing a lot of confusion. Some of the shapes you were able to get before are not possible now - plainly because those were bugs. They had to be eliminated to be able to provide correctly smoothed surface of sloping water.
Please consider the following images (and I will attach placefiles for your examination below):
Figure 1:
Figure 2:
Figure 3:
Fig 1 and 2 are the same placefile before and after upgrade. Fig 3 shows the blocky parts that were used to generate this water.
The “staircase” in the background consists of 5 blocks with vertical offset of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 studs.
The foreground “slab” is just a large slightly sloping block.
In Fig 1, you can clearly see how offsets y=1 and y=2 in the background generate the same y position, and also see the ugly staircasing in the foreground slope.
In Fig 2, those in the background are positioned correctly. (You still see 5 levels because that is not the full smoothness. There are 255 possible positions between y=0 and y=4.) And the foreground slab is “mostly smooth”. There is a remaining hint of jaggedness, but that is due to conversion and the terrain still not being perfectly smooth in all cases anyway.
Placefiles below:
WaterElevationQuantization.rbxl (45.1 KB)
WaterElevationQuantization-UPGRADED.rbxl (45.1 KB)
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I think what you are seeing here might be due to the y-snapping bug in the old water as described in my longer explanation here.
If that is the case, you indeed should be able to fix this by just editing to your desire. It should work because as you can see in the explanation, the new water is more precise than the old one, not less.
If that is not the case, please provide a place file that demonstrates this problem.
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The fact that you were able to create sharp water edges before was a bug in the old water as described in my longer explanation here. The whole point of the shorelines upgrade is to make sure that water is nice and smooth without any sharp artifacts.
To our knowledge, there shouldn’t be any significant performance difference. If you think you have a case where that happens, let us know, please.
It is on our radar and we’re tracking this feature request, but the team is currently working on other priorities and we don’t have plans for it at this time.
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Unfortunately, as @hyperhumanist answered, Shorelines doesn’t support creating water voxels with sharp edges. Good to read you were able to find a workaround with parts!
Separately, I’m also tracking a feature request for allowing cubic water voxels, but we don’t have plans regarding this request at this time.
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Those 2 properties would show up without Shorelines as well, but if you don’t have the upgrade option available, it’s normally because the place was already upgraded.
A good way to check if you have Shorelines, is to look at your water shores. If the water is animating and moving where it connects with land and if the edges are smooth, then that’s Shorelines!
If your water shores have sharp edges and are not animating with the waves, please let us know. That would be a bug.
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Speaking of cubic water voxels. Is there any internal talk or interest in allowing water to be a material type, so that parts with that material can visually look like water, but also allow for water physics?
I do my own water physics, so for me it would just be a visual thing I would want, but just curious as to if this is even anywhere in the realm of being looked at?
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Hi need some help, I want to upgrade my old place to new shorelines but accidently cancelled the upgrade prompt. and my place still uses the old shorelines. There is no upgrade button appearing in the create tab. I am Enrolled in beta, thanks in advance
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if you haven’t done much work since id just revert the game to an older version prior to updating
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That’s the issue is I’ve put about 30hrs into the game since
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Water as a material is a very frequent request we are tracking and that we keep in mind in our conversations about evolving our systems. However, we’re currently focused on other priorities and we don’t have anything to announce on that front for now.
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Thanks for reporting this issue. I’m following up with engineering so we can try and find a way you could do the upgrade again. We’ll circle back asap.
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@moonrisethepony Would you be willing to share a placefile reproducing this issue with us, please (DM: me & @hyperhumanist)? This would help us track your issue and understand what is happening. 
Hi Creators!
We’ve started Phase 1 of the Migration to Shorelines. All places that don’t have water are now using Shorelines. This migration should not have caused any visual impact to the migrated places.
The remaining places that are using water will be migrated to Shorelines on September 16th, as announced below. We encourage creators who own places with water to upgrade their place with Shorelines as soon as possible for a seamless transition.
Let us know if you encounter any issues or if you have any questions about the migration!
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