Ghoscher's Blog

This is a simple XNA project that simulates an ocean…
The idea first came to me when I was practicing on creating terrain using heightmaps! I was playing with the vertices of the terrain, giving them some motion on the Y Axis then I said to my self: “Wow! This looks like the sea wavy water! :D”

The principle is simple! examine this very simple example:

I have 9 vertices forming 4 quads
I also have an array of 9 integers to determine the direction of each vertex : up/down
when first initializing the WaterBody, a random value between -n,n is assigned to the Y component of each vertex. so each vertex should start with a random Y component… The direction of each vertex is also generated randomly!

Now all I have to do – every frame – is to move each vertex in its direction, if Position.Y<-n or Position.Y>n then fix Position.Y and change the direction of the vertex ( if up make it down, if down make it up! pretty simple huh? 🙂 )

If you apply the above to a larger number of vertices ( I used 70×70 in my project ) you’ll have a nice wavy water!
Adding some lighting and texture will make things better ;).
Adding sound effects will make things even better! 😉 😉

Here’s the final result!

You can control several things in the application like enabling/disabling lighting and texture, changing camera position…
You can change the max wave height,wind speed and the application will automatically randomize the  waves!

WaterBodies Executable ( 144 KB ) – XNA Redistributable 3.1 Required ONLY if you don’t have XNA Game Studio 3.1 installed
WaterBodies Source Code ( 183 KB ) – XNA Game Studio 3.1 Required

Revisions:

rev. 1 : Position,Rotation,Scale properties are now available! the WaterBody class is now more flexible than before!

rev. 2 : Updated camera class, now it’s a free look camera. Code now is more tidy..