Do you have any idea how difficult it will be to implement this?
Technically I think the sea in Ship Simulator is a flat planar object with a lot of tri polygons. The sea is using shaders and the waves is probably animated by the engine itself by moving the vertices up and down to simulate waves. The shaders are just used to simulate the look of the water.
But if the waves that you already have in the scene that actually goes trough the ship model is going to be pushed away from the hull when the ship is "cutting" the water at the bow (or less or more before the bow when the ship got a bulbous bow) then we can start talking about advanced dynamics here. The bow wave that SS is generating today is particle effects (very well know by me from 3D modeling and CG graphics) that is more a bow spray.
Well I will be very impressed if this gets into the next version of SS. I think SS2015 sounds more realistic. I feel sorry for the one that have to program this to get the bow waves similar to the last photo posted by the topic author. Anyway it will be very interesting. I have not yet seen a ship simulator game that simulate this. Even not Virtual Sailor got this. Because the bow wave itself is mesh containing tri polygons and the wave must respond to how fast the ship goes and the wave height used in the scene. Yeah... extremely interesting. It gives me brain storming just to think about it.
So my question is to the one that got more knowledge about this subject:
Which factors have a influence on how the bow wakes will be generated?If I'm not totally out of course here I guess this:
- the shape of the bow and the hull itself
- the depth of the ship
- the speed of the ship
- the wave height used in the environment
- the shape of the wave that hit's the bow
- the wave direction and from what angle the wave hits the ship
- the result of a bulbous bow and it's influence on waves that hits the ship (or waves that the ship hits)
And all this is going to be programmed into the sim to simulate realistic bow waves... yeah that would be really impressive. But I have my doubts. But keep on dreaming
Groeenegaard, I think he is suggesting to make bow wakes like this not only the bow spray that the game already have.
Source: http://www.hydrolance.net/common/BowWake-Wave.jpg (http://www.hydrolance.net/common/BowWake-Wave.jpg)
The results of a ship pushing a lot of water at the front. A lot of spray and many wakes in different sizes.