The biggest lie in video games

what does every one of these clips have in common they're all lies they're tricking you into thinking they have water but they don't oh well except for this this is my butter and cheese sandwich from lunch now I know you're probably thinking one of two things either no you're wrong you stupid unicorn that is water or because you know this is about video games of course that's not literally water and you'd be right but what if I told you there is a way to have water in video games [Music] think of your top three games of all time chances are water plays a critical role in at least one of them I've been making a wi themed RPG and water is really important because it's an open world game so it's really important for me to get right for the past 6 months I've been researching how thousands of other games use water and discovered the crazy length game devs go to in order to trick you into believing that the water is real and and trust me it goes much deeper than you'd think but first let's talk about why games lie to you about water in order to have true water games would have to simulate water particles there is technology that does that but it means tons of physics data points have to be calculated which is a lot for computers to do especially in real time it is possible to decrease the number of points to increase performance but doing that results in less convincing water it kind of ends up looking more like gel the alternative is to fake it which game developers have gotten really good at the earliest games had limited color palettes and resolutions so players had to rely on their imagination for water today's graphics are so convincing that you can be fully immersed in an experience now they can handle stuff like transparency reflection and normal Maps most of the impressive water effects we see in gamees games come from the clever use of math and textures this combination creates water that looks real with waves and ripples that move and change just like in real life I won't dive into specifics on the mass side of things but if that interests you check out Ace Roller's video series Linked In the description in short with the help of really smart people like this gersner guy we've gotten really good at mathing waves but the first mathing of waves had to start somewhere this is wav Ray 64 I know it doesn't look great by modern Sanders but it used an Innovative vertex displacement strategy to create the waves this meant that players could interact with the water on their jet skis for performance nine separate tiles followed the player around the tile centered on the player has the highest vertex density to create the best waves while the outer tiles have fewer vertexes and just help keep up a convincing water effect this strategy was so effective that it's still used in modern games nearly 30 years later I use the same strategy in my game and it works well it just has modern upgrades that provide additional details like surface foam Edge foam Shoreline waves and my favorite subsurface scattering that's just basically how light transmits through a material in water it's what creates these really beautiful effects in the waves from sea of Thieves but there is a challenge as watering games gets better players naturally want to interact with it more when the highly anticipated cyberpunk 2077 was released without bullet interactions which were present in older games like halflife 2 people were upset games like Red Dead Redemption 2 tie surface interactions into the vertex displacement strategy we talked about earlier to create ripples with the addition of water splash Sprites the resulting effect is pretty convincing other games especially older ones do water effects all through Sprites in the game I'm developing I decided to do a mix of both building on this I've Incorporated the use of trails for controlling vertex displacement of course when something is speeding through water you want to see water effects too while my game won't have any boats it does have witches on brooms so I use the trail to displace vertexes when the player is near the surface of the water so now I can check Brom water effects off my my list too oh what's this it's just a cool new task management system I've been using called codex it turns standard checklists into an interactive deck of cards I have it set up so supporters can see when I complete a task in Discord and suggestions are automatically added to a deck it's the first task management system I've used where I haven't had to force myself to open it that's probably because it was tailor made for game devs by game devs there are tons of cool features like leaderboards and blocking tasks but honestly you should just go check it out it's free to sign up and use you can check it out for yourself by going to cex.io which will give you 30% off your first three months if you decide to sign up for a paid tier thank you codex for making such an awesome tool and supporting this channel so far we've just talked about the water surface for some games that's where it stops and water simply is a barrier or obstacle that's not meant to be traversed or even serves as a border in the original Dark Souls mirrors Edge and Assassin's Creed entering water instantly kills you I thought this would fit well with my game since witches and water stereotypically don't mix but as many of you pointed out I shouldn't enable stereotypes the next logical progression is for games to implement surface level swimming but there are a few games that stand out as as a kind of in between here that are totally worth mentioning the main character in death stranded is bogged down with heavy equipment so it makes sense that he can't swim but the developers didn't shy away from giving him the ability to lay on his back and flap his arms around like a little otter similarly the main character in Red Dead Redemption can't swim in the first game he instantly dies when he touches water but in the second he at least attempts to swim and flails around I certainly appreciate that much more than Amazon trying to convince me that this is a part of New World's lore more commonly games at least allow the player to swim along the top of the water while Assassin's Creed didn't have swimming Assassin's Creed 2 did have surface level swimming and hiding similarly hogwart's Legacy allows the player to swim along the surface and press a button to dive for objectives from a developer standpoint not providing an underwater view limits the work required for the project while also giving the player a more meaningful way to interact with the water not only do underwater areas vastly increase the amount of models needed it also creates the expectation that there is something to do I've admittedly spent an embarrassing amount of time swimming around the water in GTA 5 searching for some hidden chest or item that didn't exist was it a let down sure but I'm at least much more forgiving than some of the people who leave Steam Reviews but the examples of surface level swimming that we just looked at are in pretty calm Waters what if we're in Open Seas then we have to think a little bit more about buoyancy if we want to align the player to the surface of a wave we just have to sample the vertexes of the water mesh and then align the player's height to the water surface this obviously extends to any objects you want to have floating in the water too add a little roll to the object and you've got yourself another lie buoyancy the way I implemented swimming into my game is if the player is near the surface of the water and looking at or above the Horizon they'll stay aligned to the surface if they look below the Horizon then they'll take a dive into what's below this is where any nightmares you have about difficult water levels comes in from a visual standpoint the important thing to create a convincing underwater effect is fog and these little squiggly things on the ocean floor called cosics in reality cosics are created when light passes through water and is refracted onto the ground calculating this physically is just insane to do Corridor crew who create visual effects here on YouTube decided to take on the challenge of creating physically simulated costic it took them 100 hours using top-of-the-line Hardware to create this 7sec clip in video games we don't have the luxury of pre-rendering instead game devs use more lies Corridor crew shows the difference between physical cosics and using a technique called a goo that's Gobo not gimbo Gobo is a term borrowed from cinematography where a plate is placed over a light to create a specific Shadow effect the difference between using a goo and physically simulating costic is pretty minimal considering the time difference between rendering both game devs use something similar with textures to create cosics all we need is to cast two tiling costic textures onto the ground and have them emit light you can use a black and white image to do this or the one I'm using has offset red green and blue channels this just gives it a more chromatic aberration kind of effect simply by scrolling the the two Textures in opposite directions we can achieve a convincing costic effect if you can pick out a specific shape you might be able to unravel the illusion the illusion becomes much more obvious when we increase the brightness subtlety is our friend here and now we have created yet another lie but seriously cosics do have a big impact just look at the difference in feel when the game does and doesn't have costic now it's time to really dig into those nightmares I'm talking about traumatic underwater gameplay experiences the first thing that comes to my mind is playing Zelda Ocarina of Time don't get me wrong I love this game but I also vividly remember dying in the water temple over and over I think the issue in most cases is that developers naturally want to add breath and doing so basically adds a timer to any underwater task I say that as I've already made a breathing mechanic in my game I think the key here is that the blue breath bar and purple energy bar are both tied to the player stamina stat which can be increased with a skill point each level I wanted to add this because I thought it would open up the opportunity to add potions items or abilities the player can work towards if they want to explore the ocean a really cool water effect I've seen used more frequently is called split view it's where the player can see both above and below water at the same time the first time I saw this effect was in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 no not that one this one how do you have a numbering system for your games and end up using the same number twice anyway the effect absolutely blows me away the player coming out of the water even has these water droplets and diving in you can see a burst of bubbles that just make it look so realistic there's another game called subside that is currently in development M that does an incredible job at this effect too the first time I saw it I literally thought it was a video so naturally I added the effect to my game too it certainly pales in comparison to the other two examples but it's my favorite water effect in video games by far an interesting challenge I had with this though was my game is in third person the two previous examples were both in first person I don't think it's a problem visually the underwater effects just show when the camera is underwater not the player something felt off with the sound for a while though I couldn't quite put my finger on it there was a splash when the player entered the water the audio clip itself is fine but it didn't feel right then I realized it's because your point of view is from the camera so I added sound so when the camera itself goes in and out of water and that does the trick throughout all of this I haven't talked about audio at all but it really is the glue that holds all of these effects together it took me so long to find sounds that fit just right you wouldn't imagine how many different ways a splash can sound and how having the wrong one makes something feel off look here's what it sounds like when I jump into the water in subnotica now here's what it sounds like when I use a different splash sound weird right and when you're underwater things should sound like you're underwater in instead of making new sounds I just applied some low and high pass filters and a little bit of Reverb to the audio I know there are some people excited about the possibility of fluid simulation in games but I think realistically developers have just gotten so good at faking it that they just don't need it access to highquality water tools has never been better during my research I found this water asset for unreal that looks absolutely incredible I'm excited to see what devs are able to create with assets like this sure it's generally more Dev work but the increase in performance means games are accessible to more players and I think that's a good thing especially if this is the quality difference we're talking about using these tricks I was able to transform the water in my game from looking like this to looking like this I don't know what you think but I'd say it's a pretty big difference but all of this work was actually just a precursor to a game mechanic I've been super excited to add Fishing and More thematically fishing on brooms if that's something you're interested in seeing make sure to subscribe to the channel to catch that video and while your Discord fan art shows in the background I'd like to just give a special thank you to all our patreon and YouTube supporters the water of Game Dev can either flow or crash but your support keeps this project afloat you're the oxygen to my dihydrogen to see the time I lost a lot of oxygen in a panic click this video where I added multiplayer to my game in 7 days

Channel: AIA

Views: 1,178,908

Keywords: unity, devlog, indie game, harry potter, unreal, visual scripting, mana valley, aia, aiadev, indiegames, rpg, zelda, tears of the kingdom, genshin impact, witch game, wholesome games, game dev, game development, unity3d, unity visual scripting, game creator, unity engine, dream game, dream, stardew valley, beginner game dev, how to make a game, barji, polymars, twostar, dani, polymars++, blackthronprod, solo dev, undertale, c#, making a game without code, sebastian lague, fluid simulation

Id: Qk_O-q_9YIQ

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024