Waves on HL2? Created 16 years ago2008-02-04 17:22:40 UTC by Spike

How can you make waves on the water on hl2? Yeah, I've used func_water_analog but it turns my water opaque and with no waves at all.

Waves like the water going up and down? Source 'waves' are part of the animation of the water texture, so you'd need to code the water physically bobbing up and down in order to achieve that effect. The func_water_analog uses a special water texture (I think 'movingplane' is somewhere in the texture name). All other water textures won't render properly when tied to entities like that.

I never tie the water to an entity.. I just drag a brush over the area I want with water.. texture the entire thing nodraw.. and texture specifically the top of it with the water texture. It works, <3

As for the actual wave part of it.. I dunno, but your water wont be opaque.

Yeah the problem is that I'm doing a beach, and calm water looks horrible on a beach. Well then I'll code (but I don't know why :P)

Fake it with a func_train (still in source?) and make it transparent. Than make it a wave shape and have it roll in, go down at the same time, then start all over.

Or if you are reasonable either ask Minerva permission to use his wave texture or make your own animated texture.

... oh, I thought you meant HL1 style moving waves.

The shore waves I think you want are accomplished with overlays. They take a whole lot of fidgeting and a whole lot of them to get them to look right.

The textures are shorewave001a and shorewave002a. Put them in and they animate in game. Play around with them a little.

Spike I was trying to do this myself a while ago, never nailed it down exactly. Like Grim said, they are overlays. Place them over the water along the beach. It takes a lot of playing to get right, so you may want to just create an empty beach so you can compile quickly over and over again. You're going to have to play with them a lot to get it to look good.

If you have any major breakthroughs send be some screenies because like I said, I couldn't get it down just right either. Curving it along the beach is difficult.

Oh, I was talking about normal waves like HL1. But yeah, I thought too on realistic beach waves but it seems to be very complicated.

I just dont want the water to look like that:Just to make a non straight edge

hmm.. might I suggest adding stuff to take away attention from the beach line.

Add rocks, rough up the beach a little bit (the beach line and the heights, make it a little hill-ish), add buoys out in the water, and turn the scale of the water texture from .25 to 1. That'll help I think.

(HL1 waves cant exist, as water textures cannot be parented to moving objects without crashing)

make it low-tide. it's much more interesting, and you don't need big waves. also play through the half-life beach parts and take lots of screenshots of the water for reference.

Do you know how can i see the original material files (.vtf .vmt) so I can see how the different textures of HL2 are codded?

Extract with GCFscape? I extracted some CS:S water .vmts. Dunno if your textures can be accessed like that.

Oh yes, thanks, I didn't know gcfscape work on Source too

you shouldn't have to do that. your textures should all be in hammer.

your textures should all be in hammer.

You can view vmts in hammer?

You need Another program to convert the BSPs into hammer-editeable maps.
I think it's called Ver.. V.. something.

VMEX?

Yeah but why would he need it? All textures are in Hammer, if you need to look at the VMT code then extract and open in text.

that second screenie looks a lot like the arch from halo1 on that beach..

That's how it looks now, so much better. I haven't played Halos so it's not fro there, it's just inspiration from movies or don't know where.

Oh sweet I see an airboat? Do they work in EP2?

And new textures? Reminds me of the DBZ mod texture pack they released for us mappers.

I'm doing it for Ep2. Cliff texture is TF2 texture modified by me so it's a little bit more brown and dark, sand texture is TF2 modified too. Actually the airboat is just for testing, the map is big and I'm too lazy to be running all the time >:)