As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to make realistic water to your liking.
I wanted to make terrain have very large waves to simulate in storms, but currently the max wave height is only 1. Not to mention, water only uses sine/cos wave (that’s what it looks like anyways) making it impossible to have really good looking waves.
The only other option is to add my own water, but we all know how that would fail (updating thousands of triangles every frame… what a joke, unless someone has secret methods…)
To fix this, I have two possible methods:
Allowing wave height to be greater than 1, add wave size in width as well (so we can have long waves.)
Allowing us to set the algorithm (not totally sure how this would work as I don’t know how the terrain water is coded, but you get the picture)
An example I came across recently of what I would like to be possible:
Another nice addition (for future) is to allow certain sections to have different water settings. I believe this was already mentioned in a feature request in the past.
The thing with smooth terrain water is that wave size doesn’t affect physics at all, so if wave sizes that are larger than 1 were to become reality, it would purely serve an aesthetic purpose.
It would look pretty weird if wave sizes larger than 1 were possible without having some impact on the in-game physics.
Even 2 years later, Terrain water is still very limiting in terms of styling it to your liking. It’s like that thing that’s there… but you can’t really use it. I’m building a ship game, and well… Even though I can create some decent storms the water will be forever calm. And that’s just disappointing. I’m hoping Roblox won’t skip over this in the upcoming Custom Materials and that those Materials also work for the terrain. But water in Roblox seriously need a revamp. The current implementation is nice and awesome for general games using water. But for a naval game where water is the #1 mechanic it’d be nice to have a lot more control over it. Rather than having to choose between parts, or smooth terrain, fake water or real water… or an impossible combination of both.
At this point, I feel having a separate water instance would be a better option - this would allow for multiple water planes with different wave intensities and colours, having just one object to define a plane (or a volume) rather than potentially millions of voxels, being able to move it around cheaply and without having to modify terrain… it could even be modified to have different densities, so you can have any liquid.
9 years and no change has been made, I might as well make my own wave system at this point, even if it took a decade it would be faster than waiting for Roblox to implement this.
