Better Oceans

The game's sea is a flat blue plane with two sine waves in it. This gives it a surface, a swell, a shoreline, and a menu to run it from.

Waves that come in from the open sea, turn to face the beach, stand up in the shallows and break. Foam that runs up the sand and drains back. Water you can see into. Ripples that travel with the wind and never repeat. Sun glitter across the chop. Boats leave a wake. And a Shaders screen in the pause menu where you switch any of it on or off, live.

What changes

A real swell. Forty wave trains from a proper ocean spectrum (JONSWAP, the one oceanographers use), long and short, fanned across the wind. No two waves alike and nothing that repeats.
Waves that know where the land is. The mod surveys the seabed around you. Waves slow down in the shallows and bunch up, turn to arrive parallel to the beach and wrap around headlands, grow as the water gets thin, and break when it gets too thin to hold them. Gently sloping beaches get spilling surf, steep ones get plunging surf, and the water runs up the sand and drains back.
The boat rides it. Everything that floats sits on exactly the water that is drawn: the mod teaches the game's own water-height lookup the same waves, so boats, bobbers and crates ride the swell with no desync. The mod checks the two agree on startup and says so in the log.
You can see through it. Stand in the shallows and look down: your hands, the sand, rocks, the dock legs and the boat's hull are all there through the surface, bent a little by the ripples and tinted by how much water you are looking through. Clear over the sand, blue where the seabed drops away. Looking along the surface gives you the sky instead, as real water does.
A real surface. Eight scales of drifting detail that run with the wind the way real water does, ridged crests, fine glitter, a sky mirrored at low angles. Calm patches and rough patches, hundreds of metres across.
Foam with a body. Whitewater is bumpy, matte and lit like the layer of bubbles it is, with a darker lip on the water it rides. Whitecaps are wind streaks torn along the sea, not white dots.
It is lit by the game. Torches, lanterns, the sun, the moon, fog, shadows, reflections and the weather all reach the water the same way they reach everything else.
Boats leave a wake. White, roughened, heaped at the edges, fading after a few seconds. Every boat on the water, not only yours.

How to use it

Install it and play. The defaults are a calm, clear, tropical sea.

Press Escape and there is a Shaders button in the pause menu, just above Main Menu. It opens a screen in the game's own style:

Better Oceans: On / Off. The whole mod. Off puts the game's own water back on the spot.
Quality: Classic / Realistic / Ultra. See below.
Waves: On / Off. The swell. Off is a flat sea, like the original game but with the new surface.
Surf and shore foam: On / Off. Breakers, swash and the foam line.
Boat wake: On / Off.
Water lights: On / Off. Whether torches and lamps light the sea.
Sky reflection: On / Off. Whether the sky is mirrored in the water.
Back.

Everything is live, and everything is saved to the config so it stays that way next time.

The three qualities

Classic. The first Better Oceans: the shader that works out its own light. Lighter on the GPU. No spectrum swell, because that shader cannot draw one and the boat must float on what is drawn.
Realistic. The default. The spectrum sea, trimmed so it runs well: around three times cheaper per pixel than the first version of it, with the same look.
Ultra. The same sea with nothing trimmed. Forty waves instead of twenty four, a half-metre mesh instead of one metre, a finer seabed survey, and the shader measuring everything everywhere instead of skipping open water. For PCs that can take it.

Making it yours

Everything the menu does and a lot more is in yoxi.htf.water.cfg:

[Swell] - WaveHeight (0.28 by default; 1.0 is a rough day, 2.0 is a storm), LongestWave, HowManyWaves, WaveSpreadDegrees, HowFastItRolls, CrestsPeak, Seed, and the shore behaviour: WavesBreakOnTheShore, HowFarOutTheyBreak, WavesTurnToFaceTheShore, BreakByBeachSlope, WaterRunsUpTheBeach.
[Seeing into it] - SeeIntoTheWater and SeeThisFarDown (6m by default; 10 is postcard clear).
[Shore] - ShorelineFoam and the survey Detail.
[Water] - Quality, BoatWake, WakeSeconds, WakeWidth, TorchesLightTheWater, Brightness, Whitecaps.
[Reflection] - ReflectTheSky.

Set TuningMenu = true and press F9 in game for a panel of sliders for the look itself: colour, ripples, glitter, foam, haze, clarity, how see-through the surface is, refraction. The sea changes as you drag. Save keeps it.

Multiplayer

Nothing is sent over the network. Each game works the waves out from the same numbers, so two players with the mod see the same sea, and a player without it sees the ordinary one. Boats float the same for everyone.

Best with Living Skies

The sea is lit by the game's own light, so whatever Living Skies is doing overhead arrives on the water by itself: the ocean warms at sunset and the sun lays a path across it, it goes grey and hard under a storm, and the moon rides the swell at night. Neither needs the other.

Get it here: Living Skies

A note on AI

I used AI to help with parts of this mod, which is why it has the AI-generated tag. But let me be straight about it: AI did not make this mod, I did. Every idea in here is mine. I decided what a real ocean should look like, I built the Unity side, I ripped and rebuilt the islands it runs on, I sat in the game for hours on end testing every wave and every shoreline, and I threw out and redid anything that was not right, over and over, until it was. AI helped me write some of the code faster. There is only so much AI can do, and the rest, which is most of it, is me.

Built by Yoxi.

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