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Ryuu96 on 29 March 2023
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The ocean water’s bulges and contractions exert a greater influence on play in the online pirate adventure “Sea of Thieves.” Its deep water simulation conjures up the uneasy terror you’d find watching videos of ships battling the nautical elements. Your boat careens from side to side and up and down, ocean spray dissipating over the deck as you maneuver across the high seas in search of treasure — or enemy vessels.

Mark Lucas, lead rendering engineer on “Sea of Thieves,” explained that the starting point for the game’s water was a 2001 paper by Jerry Tessendorf, the VFX guru behind the water in “Titanic.” Because Lucas and his colleagues knew that they wanted to replicate the vertiginous swells of the deep ocean, they needed “large, high amplitude, low frequency waves” — or, simply, epic but infrequent motions. For the ripples on the surface, it was the inverse: high frequency, low amplitude waves. They took the math that would create all of these overlapping waveforms and used another mathematical tool called the Fourier Transform to convert them “into the actual physical shape of the water surface,” Lucas said.

The secret sauce, the reason the ocean in “Sea of Thieves” looks so “lifelike,” Lucas said, is the pairing of this already complicated math with the Phillips spectrum, a model created in 1958 by noted geophysicist Owen Martin Phillips. According to Lucas, this model explains how “ocean water behaves based on meteorological analysis.”

The game’s water, Lucas points out, is only possible because of a large, decades-old body of research. “It’s a lot of people working in lots of different fields that have all contributed to it,” he said.

Lucas thinks that the water in “Sea of Thieves” now nearly meets the standard of the world’s most celebrated movie effects.

“We’re actually doing the calculations almost at the quality level that was used in ‘Titanic,’ but in real time,” he said. “We’re one notch down.” The reason is twofold according to Lucas: the miracle of modern graphics processing units and nearly an ocean’s worth of code optimization.