Realtime water reflection, refraction and physics | Developmen diary #12 news - Nucleotide

Nucleotide game development diary series covers the development progress of the eponymous game in a form of video blog. This is our latest video:

Transcript:
Hello there, Ivan here, bringing you updates on the Nucleotide game development.From the last development diary, I've improved the water surface shader, or more precisely, water surface effect. I'm calling it effect because it requires render-to-texture and some additional C# code, for camera transformations, in order for it to simulate real-time reflections.This effect also simulates light refraction, which makes everything underneath the water surface look distorted. It might seem at first that this effect is visible only around the player, but that isn't the case.If you look closely, on any other part of the scene, you can see that water isn't completely still, at any time. I took that feature from Unitys Water4 example, and made some modifications, in order for it to work with water surface physics, that were already in the game. Additionally, I've made some changes to player swimming animation, and speed;When playing with it before, I had a feeling that player is struggling with the water, which should not be the case. I want him to dominate his environment in every way.Even though this guy looks like a frog, he isn't. My goal wasn't to realistically simulate a frog, nor frogs moves, so all deviations that you see were probably intentional. I also started working on the tongue, again. I can now shoot the tongue towards nothing grabbable, and it will make a slightly different shape every time it get's out.I can also, as before, grab objects and drag them around, this is obviously far from done, but it does work. I took some time to create a decent looking scene for this video, it is far from what I want to achieve in the finished game, but you can defiantly see where the art-style for this game is heading.