Wave animation - possible useful reference

[Simons Mith]

Not sure which forum is right for this post; please move it if necessary.

The 1.9.2 animation for water lapping against a beach isn't very good. (Although I do know it's only an early WIP.) I had seen a couple of better implementations, but I couldn't remember where. Now I've partly remembered. One is in OpenTransport Tycoon (available for free from http://www.openttd.org/en/) and the Lucas Arts Monkey Island games. Monkey Island II, I think.

Both use a sort of animated white band around the shoreline which sort of moves forwards and back in surges. It's quite effective for sea waves, and I wondered if the technique might be stealable for Wesnoth too. If it was toned down a bit and made less white, it might work for river ripples too. I just thought I'd mention this as I happened to come across it again today.

[Gambit]

Moved to a forum where the relevant people might read it.

Though here once again (the third time?), we find you complaining about art after months have work has gone into it and it is nearly complete rather than when it sat as a WIP for months in a publicly viewable forum. And, if you feel the word complaining is too harsh, then at the very least, you are giving critique that would require a complete redo from scratch to satisfy.

[Simons Mith]

I do beg your pardon. But in this particular case
the reason I didn't raise the matter before was
because I hadn't played OpenTTD for a good
year. But I fired it up a couple of days ago and
immediately thought, 'Hey, their wave animation
is better than ours'. In addition, because the
OpenTTD game scale is comparable to Wesnoth's,
their wave animation method might be adaptable for
Wesnoth's uses. I do appreciate that 'might be' is
not the same as 'is'.

So I thought I'd post a reference link, just in
case their water technique was useful to us.
Especially given that their game is free too.

There's far too much going on on these forums for
me to follow even 30% of posts, and I don't
actually remember seeing any posts about the water
animations coming up. So obviously I missed or at
best skimmed them at the time.

I'm sorry if I upset anyone, but just because some
aspect Wesnoth's current art/animation is 'of an
acceptable quality', whoever chooses to call it
'acceptable' at the time, it doesn't mean that
part of the game is frozen forever more. I really
liked Jason Lutes' artwork at the time it
appeared, and it was an approved part of the game
for quite some time. That didn't stop it getting
superceded. The current water animations could go
the same way, and if they do, and the OpenTTD
reference is useful, what's wrong with posting it?

PS OpenTTD also does several smoke animations, and
I believe smoke has been on the Wesnoth wanted
list for ages. Perhaps also their partly-melted
snow terrain too, or various other minor bits.

[Tet]

Well I would say the waves really have issues with the beach. Has anybody seen a single waterhole in sand? (just open the first szenario of the meermen campaign.) I would call it a geysir or pulsar. Maybe a quick fix would be to have to types of sand. One with wave transition and one without. I do not get the choice of concave and convex transition either. Why not having both?

[Eleazar]

The wave animation IS sorta a WIP. I'm not happy with it, but put it out there so someone could follow without having to figure out the cutting from scratch.
I encourage someone to make a better one, though i caution that it is a lot more complicated than you might think.