3DVIA Subsurface Development blog

>Here's a link to a hi-res video

Here's some video snippets of the underwater enviroment and game controls.

because we're aiming at current gaming pc's but in an online enviroment as well , we want to keep filesize low, so the enviroment features a selected amount of normal map shaders on the base enviroment. In an extension of this optimisation, all foliage, fish (now only a shark), lightbeams etc etc are spawned as a relatively simple placement and spawning script, iterating over a selection of spawnable items.

There's no particle effects in the video , but these and other sfx will be added later. Als the Submarine itself is not using any dynamic lighting, to optimise the scene, we chose to keep the submarine static, because its also physically always within the same lightcone, (it being the source of most lights in the world) We're also hard at work to create a large selection of spawn-able foliage, such as brain corals, spunges, and other deep-sea flora.

Deep sea Corals? When we think of lush coral based ecosystems we always tend to think of warm shallow tropical settings, but did you know there's large coral systems in the deep atlantic, apparantly the colder streams of the north atlantic are very rich in foodsources, allowing corals to grow much much deeper, where as tropical waters tend to be poor in nutrients, requiring coral to seek nurishment close to the surface.

here's a link to the story