TL;DR you only need to set the category of a vehicle for ocean interaction to Sea Mode. Your beach just needs a less than 10 degree angle to create foam and to simulate shore breaks, you can place Breaker objects in your level. In the early days of open-world games, shorelines were rudimentary, often depicted as abrupt edges or static boundaries in titles like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker or early Grand Theft Auto series, with minimal wave action due to computational constraints. These relied on basic height maps and collision zones, but lacked tidal dynamics or breaking waves, as rendering expansive coastal areas demanded intensive server synchronization for multiplayer persistence. By the 2000s, MMOs like EVE Online and Sea of Thieves advanced shore simulations, incorporating procedural waves and tide cycles that heavily taxed CPUs and GPUs, as the complexity of simulating interactive beaches—complete with foam trails and vehicle wakes—required balancing visual realism against the demands of vast, shared worlds with thousands of players.
The visual complexity of rendering shores involves multifaceted effects, from wave breaks curling into whitewater to foam dissipating on sands and tidal distortions along gradients, all managed through layered shaders. Breaks utilize displacement maps to curl wave crests, while foam is generated via noise-based textures that accumulate at shallow depths. Tidal effects leverage vertex shaders to simulate water level oscillations, distorting reflections and refractions near land slopes. These components demand integrated shader pipelines, where base ocean color merges with specular highlights and subsurface scattering, ensuring lifelike coastal visuals under dynamic lighting.
Limitations across devices, particularly mobile, intensify these issues, as constrained GPUs and power budgets limit the detail of shore rendering. Desktop systems handle high-fidelity shaders effortlessly, but mobile browsers enforce throttling, necessitating reductions in wave resolution or foam complexity. WebGPU in Tetra alleviates some burdens with optimized rendering, yet variability in support—such as partial implementations in certain browsers—requires adaptive fallbacks, like simplifying shader logic or employing lower-fidelity textures to sustain performance without compromising essential coastal interactions. In Tetra, the integration of physics materials and shore effects is streamlined for terrain objects, ensuring automatic application without deep developer involvement. All predefined beach planes incorporate depth textures by default, produced during the initial render pass and available in post-processing phases. This configuration enables custom ShaderPasses to sample slope values automatically, adjusting breaks and tides to align with PhysX computations. The water system in Tetra is extremely useful to create coastal levels, harnessing WebGPU's strengths to enforce material instancing universally. This implies attributes like wave curl, foam density, and tidal range are managed inherently within shaders, activated by property tweaks. Developers gain from this simplification, as no bespoke code is needed to tailor the system for varying shores or vehicles; the engine's node-based materials guarantee compatibility, with automatic dissemination of data via the compute graph.
Shore rendering incorporates specialized techniques, including a dynamic water line for transitions between open sea and beach, achieved via custom passes that build on depth-aware methods from prior wetness and underwater implementations. A ShaderPass segments the view at the tide boundary, applying foam enhancements and slope-based distortions below the line while preserving clear wave visuals above, ensuring seamless coastal immersion. Particles and simulations underpin dynamic shore elements, such as foam trails forming at breaks or wakes trailing vehicles, with emitters producing clusters governed by velocity fields. In Tetra, instanced particles update through compute shaders on WebGPU, modeling coalescence and dissipation for authentic coastal turbulence, integrated with broader solvers for emergent patterns like eddy formation at shores.
With fluid dynamics phenomena like waves breaking on slopes, tidal pulls influenced by terrain angles, and masks to confine effects to appropriate zones the immersive experience becomes realistic. Breaks occur when wave energy concentrates on inclines below 10 degrees, propagating foam via damped equations. Tidal effects are modulated by land gradients, with shallower slopes amplifying ebb and flow through buoyancy adjustments using our implementation of PhysX. Masks use depth comparisons to restrict rendering, preventing unnatural overlaps like waves penetrating inland models, maintaining simulation integrity with minimal overhead.
Waves and shore breaks are computed using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms, producing height fields from spectral inputs to model curling undulations. In Tetra, WebGPU compute shaders execute FFT operations concurrently, yielding realistic swells that intensify near shores through slope-modified equations, varying height and frequency for diverse tidal conditions without heavy CPU reliance.
Currents impact rigid body objects by exerting directional impulses within physics simulation, altering trajectories and orientations for drifting debris or seafaring vehicles, like the jet ski’s from the Xolo game “Wave”, and flow maps define patterns across coastal zones, interpolated over the terrain, guaranteeing uniform responses like guiding boats along tides while accounting for mass and resistance for precise dynamics.
Rendering utilizes GPU tessellation to refine shore meshes on-the-fly, boosting detail according to Level of Detail (LOD) frameworks that modulate subdivision based on proximity. Near views gain intricate foam and break tessellation, whereas remote horizons employ sparser grids, enhancing efficiency on WebGPU by curbing vertex loads without diminishing visual unity. The application of decals and shore-deforming entities permits localized simulation tweaks, such as intensified breaks from placed Breaker objects, paired with special custom ShaderPasses for captivating effects. Decals overlay foam patterns on impacted zones, while deformers alter the shore mesh through displacement fields; ShaderPasses overlay distortions and gloss, merging these with global systems for striking, unified shores.
By embedding these features at the asset level, the system democratizes advanced shore effects, making them accessible even to non-technical users. This approach not only accelerates iteration in browser environments, where performance is paramount, but also ensures consistency across devices, as WebGPU handles the underlying computations efficiently. Basically, it empowers developers to prototype and refine shore interactions rapidly, dreamscaping more dynamic and responsive game worlds.
Tetra's implementation of its water system is extremely efficient and performing, utilizing WebGPU to render coastal features with ease that behave like you would expect. This design philosophy reduces setup burdens, permitting creators to concentrate on level crafting over technical challenges. For any shore terrain, the procedure distills to selection in the Infinity SDK and refining properties like slope angle or breaker placement through user-friendly controls. These parameters interpolate simulation uniforms dynamically, fusing effects like foam buildup or tidal shifts non-destructively, and can be animated or linked to environmental cues without any extra scripting.