2d water wave effect

[chrisevans1001]

Hi there,
Just looking for a little advice. I'm working on a 2D game and presently have just a plain blue tile for the water. I then discovered this little video:

Crimson: Steam Pirates - First Look - YouTube

If you watch a few seconds in, you'll see some pictures of the water and what appears to be random waves placed across it.

Any suggestions how this may have been achieved?

Cheers

[KarlJay]

No expert here, but can you group tiles together to make a larger area, then fade a 'white cap' in and out? In other words make 6 of your tiles with increasing levels of the white cap, then fade them in on a timer. And for the random effect, define an array and work the fading section around the array.

[dennno]

Originally Posted by chrisevans1001

Hi there,
Just looking for a little advice. I'm working on a 2D game and presently have just a plain blue tile for the water. I then discovered this little video:

Crimson: Steam Pirates - First Look - YouTube

If you watch a few seconds in, you'll see some pictures of the water and what appears to be random waves placed across it.

Any suggestions how this may have been achieved?

Cheers

I'm guessing you mean the very faint small waves generated randomly. From the looks of it they created the graphic animation and play that animation at random locations of the map depending on what part of the map is visible.

I don't know if you're using a game engine or not, but how I would do it (with cocos2d) is:
1. create the simple animation on flash/photoshop
2. schedule a timer to handle animations at random location
3. at every tick generate random coordinates, based on the current portion of the map visible on the screen.
4. loop until no longer required.