2.19.1 — the one where the sun learned to move

Big update. Also several apologies. Let's go.

the sun moves now

It didn't before. The light on the water was three numbers I typed once:

LIGHT_X = 0.35
LIGHT_Y = 0.85
LIGHT_Z = 0.40

One direction. Forever. Midnight looked exactly like noon. The glitter path pointed the same way for your entire playthrough. Every other thing in this mod follows the sky — the waves, the wind, the tides — and the light was just sitting there like a lamp taped to the ceiling.

Now it's actually where the sun is. Warm and low at dawn and dusk, white overhead at noon, dim blue by moonlight. Waves shadow each other when the sun is low, so troughs go dark and crests catch everything.

the sparkly path thing

You know when the sun's at the right angle and there's that road of sparkles across the water pointing right at you. That.

Couldn't exist before. The old code lit up any wave facing the sun. But a glitter road is made of waves reflecting the sun into your eyeball, which is a completely different set of waves, and it's why the road follows you when you walk along a beach. The maths never knew where you were looking. So: no road, just a vague shine.

It knows now. Plus four layers of tiny ripples that smash the shine into thousands of moving sparkles. First attempt used two layers and made a honeycomb pattern. It looked like a bathroom window. Sea does not look like a bathroom window.

the beach flickering. finally. actually.

Two real culprits, and neither one was the beach.

Number one: the ocean was time travelling. The waves run on their own clock so they stay smooth between game ticks. When that clock drifted 0.6 seconds off, the code went "oops" and snapped it back — teleporting every wave in the world half a second into the past. About once per second. Forever.

frame 15   1200.6245
frame 16   1200.0250   <- excuse me
frame 17   1200.0543

Worse on laggy servers, which is why some people saw it constantly and others thought we were all making it up.

Number two: auto-quality was having a fight with itself. Turning detail back up costs 4x more, and the check guarding it only allowed 2.2x of headroom. So it'd step up, immediately blow the budget, step back down, and do that forever — swapping out half the vertices in the ocean every time. I simulated 960 different machine speeds. 84 of them did this permanently. If you had bad FPS near water AND shimmering, congrats, same bug.

two things are now off

Beach flooding & swash — gone. Six releases of "the beaches look wrong" and every single time the thing that identified it was somebody turning that switch off. Waves still reach the shore, we just don't do the wash-up-the-sand bit anymore.

Current streaks — those white dashes on the water. They were supposed to be foam lining up along the flow. They looked like litter. Bye.

Both still in the config if you loved them. Currents themselves totally unchanged, still shoving your boat around.

why was there poop in my ocean

Because of me. Sorry.

I added sky reflections — water at an angle is a mirror, it should catch the sky's colour, good idea. Then I made it reflect the sun's colour in every direction at once, at 62% strength.

Orange. Over blue water. At 62%. Everywhere. All the way around the horizon.

That's brown. That is how you make brown. The entire ocean went the colour of a puddle in a car park. Now it's warm only where you're actually facing the sun, blue everywhere else, and at 34%.

the humbling bit

That brown ocean shipped past nine passing test suites.

Every one of them checks whether the sea is stable. No flicker, no seams, no jumping, no pulsing. And a completely frozen, perfectly smooth, immaculately non-flickering mud puddle passes absolutely all of them.

Not one test ever asked "is the water blue though".

There's a tenth now. 96 different views across a whole day. Fails if red beats blue. It caught me overcorrecting within about four minutes, so, worth it.

tl;dr — sun moves, sparkles work, beaches fixed, ocean is not poop. Update, don't touch anything, the settings sort themselves out.