On my todo list for X-Plane 10.0: do something to get rid of the goofy reflections in the planet-wide water.  The problem is that the reflection tricks that we pull to draw water look wrong when we zoom out so much that water surfaces are curved.

So what if we just got rid of planetary water entirely?

Apparently the ocean is “full of stars”…

Here’s another picture, lest you think I spend 100% of my time destroying X-Plane’s shaders.

That’s still in the shader development stage – I’ll toss it to Javier to work out the tuning once it’s a little bit further along.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

6 comments on “Who Needs the Ocean?

    1. Yep – when I post pics to the dev blog I rarely bother to do things like:
      * turn on anti-aliasing
      * get rid of debug art assets and experimental stuff
      * hide whatever the hell datarefs are on the screen…
      The pics are really supposed to be “this is what we’re working on” not “this is what you will see when you fly”.

  1. Do you use larger, low res tiles with different textures when you zoom right out to curved planet views?

  2. One problem I’ve had with X-Plane 9.x is the water is almost always moving way too fast. I’m sitting at KaiTak and the water ironically looks like a 400 mph tsunami coming in. Then, all of a sudden the surface texture switches direction or begins to moves at a normal 1-2 mph pace.

    When coming in for a landing some place, quite often the water surface is moving super fast at weird directions busting the illusion entirely.

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