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teragen

Ocean Tides

3 posts in this topic

In the earliest stages of history, many tribes considered their homelands to be like living beings.  Old man mountain might be akin to a grumpy old man, remote and rugged, and likely to grouch at any moment, whereas a lush river delta might be more like a loving mother caring for her children.  In short, the land was as dynamic as those that roamed it.

To this end, for those that lived along the coast, there was nothing more dynamic than the rise and fall of the tides.  A tide could was away the old and bring in the new, it could open route to adventure or seal off an island from the mainland.   A tide is the difference between fish schooling over a submerged reef, or the same reef gasping at the sky.  But how to get it to work.

My idea would be to over-write the top 4-6 layers of ocean blocks with new tidal blocks during world generation.  The tidal block would be a two(+) state block where one behaved like air, and the other like normal sea water.  The server would keep track of tide height, and loaded chunks could flip the state of tidal blocks at the appropriate layer.  At high tide the sea might lap near the top of the beach, while low tide might expose great swathes of usually submerged land.

Biggest pain I can think of is when you get into arctic waters where the sea starts to freeze over in winter.  Flipping the state on a layer is one thing, but having to sort through and move ice blocks up and down is going to start chewing a few more resources.  Potentially though, you can still dodge around that, for example, by dictating that the highest tides are at the equator, and tidal effect dwindles away to nothing by the time you get to an area that freezes.  As such, at the equator, tides would range +-3 blocks from the middle of the 6 layers of tidal blocks, while farther north you would have +-2 or +-1 until you got to the no change region, where no tidal blocks would be changing state at all.

The whole thing would look a lot smoother if you used partial blocks (same vibe as stacked charcoal) in conjunction with tide height, but that'd probably be more of a performance issue.

Any thoughts?

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On 4/18/2017 at 11:19 PM, teragen said:

Any thoughts?

I have seen something that looks like you could raise and lower the ocean in a dimension but I've never used it to see if it works. While I think it is possible I worry about what load it might have on the server for such a minor detail.

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I love the idea of tides because they add a nice feeling to the world, but other than ambience what would they be useful for.  I feel like to make coding in something that sounds pretty difficult worth the effort it should have an important use. A few things that sound interesting to me is if during high and/or low tide a certain food item, like clams or something, was available at one tide stage but not the other. Alternatively, maybe when the tide goes out it could leave behind random items like they "washed up" in the high tide, which would disappear when high tide came back and then would be replaced by new items next low tide. Maybe rocks could wash up, or more rare things, like glass. Just an idea, thought it might make tides more important.

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