As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to see long distances underwater. We are limited to a WaterTransparency property of 1.
If a player is in control of a fast moving object underwater such as a Shark or Submarine it’s hard to predict oncoming objects until it is too late and a collision takes place.
As creator of SharkBite, the largest game that completely relies on Roblox water terrain this limits what I can create, I can’t create fast sharks or fast under water boats. It also limits exciting experiences I can create for the players as they can only see so far due to ‘underwater fog’.
Currently this is as far as a user can see, which is fine for swimming but not for anything else.
‘Water Transparency’ currently effects both the underwater fog distance and the transparency of the water from above. If there was a different property for ‘underwater fog’ similar to the ‘FogEnd’ & ‘FogStart’ properties of Lighting this would fix the issue.
I would definitely like to see underwater fog made more controllable.
In my own game I have some highly detailed underwater environments that suffer due to the forced fog distance.
I want to create detailed and lively underwater environments using terrain water because it’s the most attractive option when players are also meant to be on land, but I can’t do that adequately because this fog severely limits the amount the player can see, so underwater spaces feel very claustrophobic.
I’m highly rooting for this option, we’re seeing many underwater genre games release this year such as realistic animal & marine underwater simulations, mermaid games, boat simulations & simulators in general, many underwater games that already exist such as SharkBite, Titanic, Scuba-diving, fish simulators and any game in general whom could use this feature to be more expansive.
Currently there are Developers who defer from using the water terrain due to these limiting lack of options - visibility being a strong influence, which divert the developer not to use the water terrain at all (Instead using flying mechanics without the water to simulate swimming in water)
I would definitely love to see more water terrain properties such as a true visibility, also a property that allows the players to walk along the sea bed as well as swim would also offer other games more expansion.
This is very important to me. I’m making very large underwater spaces that players are meant to explore but they won’t be able to see anything because of the fog.
This is the same space before and after adding water.
This particular limitation has previously dissuaded me from creating underwater scenes on Roblox. It’s very hard to get desirable visual and gameplay when we can’t remove a very close fog limitation.
Though, I’d suggest instead of just increasing the WaterTransparency limit, instead having WaterTransparency be the intensity of the “mask” effect when you’re underwater that gives the color, and adding a WaterFog property. Would be a drastic improvement and would persuade me to use the water material.
I’m still facing this limitation which is really detracting from immersive and well designed game play using water which is a vital component to so many games on and off the platform.
This still critically harms the underwater portion of my map. Players simply avoid it completely because it’s claustrophobic and you can’t see anything.
In our game Egg Hunt: The Great Yolktales we used terrain water to appear visually as puddles in the road. We disable the swimming state because we don’t want players to be able to swim through these puddles, but we’re unable to remove the intense fog which appears if the player’s camera collides with it.
I’d like to be able to fully disable it for cases like this.
Another example of how limiting WaterTransparency is. If the camera were to be positioned behind a shark in a 3rd person perspective, the fog is so limiting you can’t see ahead of you to know if you’re about to crash into a wall.
How it looks in 3rd person (notice no wall can be seen)
After speaking with @opplo we are responding to include a resolution to this into the Atmosphere updates of planned road map of Dynamic Skies (phase 1c), which we are aiming for this quarter. More in depth lighting and atmosphere updates are coming in phase 3 dynamic skies lighting improvements (phase 2 concerns clouds shape control improvement) and feedback is continuously welcome. These are complex and powerful updates we are tackling for the duration of this year. Often fixes that happen in current Q can get delayed with the release, verification, beta, etc. processes before they reach full deployed stage for production client games, but mostly don’t take too much into the following Q.
