Sea.ini controls visual tunings related to the sea, such as the texture of the water surface, and visibility below the water's surface. Builders may find that, despite not understanding what each tuning does, they can get nice effects by trial and error. However those with a clear understanding of each tuning's effect can share their research in the annotations below.
Annotated Format[]
EA annotations in red
Wiki editor annotations in green
[MiscSeaParams]
Texture coordinate scales for normal map levels 1 and 2 What are the effects of this tuning?
Global scaling rate for normal map scrolling for waves. What are the effects of this tuning?
MinimumTimeRate is independent of the game clock. ClockTimeScale is a multiple of the game clock. A MinimumTimeRate of 0 will allow the wave motion to come to a complete halt when the game is paused. A ClockTimeScale of 0 will make the wave animation completely independent of clock time. At least one of these needs to be nonzero or the waves will always be frozen. Note that this is just for sea; ponds have their own value.
Sun vertical stretch factor What are the effects of this tuning?
Sun radius and falloff function can be adjusted by editing GameData/Textures/WaterSunSpecular.dds This variable is being used for the ponds as well.
SunStretchFactor = Numerical range?
THIS NO LONGER WORKS MIP selection parameters: the water shader uses a the MIP level lookup of a dummy grayscale texture to determine the relative influence of the blurry+flat versus crisp+rippled effect. The texture used for this can be adjusted by changing WaterMipSampler.dds. Adjusting the tiling density will affect which mip levels get chosen, thus setting the beginning and endpoints for the MIP lookups. Higher numbers mean blurrier water.
MipLookupScaleU = MipLookupScaleV =
Defines the water depth at which murkiness completely takes over. This value influences how far underwater players can see. Setting this value very low can make the water very see-through, as is the case with Bridgeport's default tuning (1.0). This can have an unpleasant effect, exposing edges that should be concealed. To avoid this it is best to keep the value higher (10.0).
0 is always clear(refractively) and any depth above this value will be dominated by the Sea Water Color defined by the weather timeline (unless it's being reflective due to fresnel). Lower numbers mean murkier water. Note that this value gets baked into the verts at geometry generation time, and currently is not getting re-applied per-frame.
WaterDepthFactor =
1.0 - 10.0+
Amount of difraction in the shoreline lookup What are the effects of this tuning?
RefractionDistortionScale = Numerical range?
Controls blend of shoreline depths. Controls how gradually the shoreline transitions down into opaque water color.
ShoreDepthStart cannot be zero since it is used in a division operation.
ShoreDepthStart = 1.0+
ShoreDepthEnd = End of numerical range?