Making waves

Our regular readers out there may have noticed that water screenshots are a somewhat recurring theme (dare I say fetiche?) in our game reviews. Back in the day, water meant a few blue pixels, but a lot has changed in recent years thanks to GPUs and their pixel shaders. The February 2008 edition of the Game Developer magazine has an interesting article on making waves written by one of the Surf's Up game developers. Unfortunately it is not publicly available, but a digital version can be purchased. On the other hand, there is a good article on the same topic, freely available on gamasutra . A word of caution, both articles are a bit heavy on math and physics.