What we're building next

Water reacts to anything that touches it, anywhere in the level — including the open ocean. The simulation window follows the player, so there is no boundary to fall out of and no setup per area.

Place a simulation actor over a river, lake or beach and the water becomes real fluid: it flows downhill, pools behind obstacles, and reacts to the actual terrain underneath instead of a flat plane.

An authoring kit for hydraulics: drop a Force actor set to Vortex over a lake and the water genuinely rotates around it. Sources feed water in, drains empty it, currents push boats downstream.

Physically-derived open-ocean swell driven by wind rather than hand-placed sine waves — wind speed, direction, patch length, choppiness and spectrum seed. The most realistic ocean we have shipped.

Build an entire hydrology: rivers that flow down terrain into lakes and out to the ocean, with authored blend materials at the seams instead of hard edges. Plus islands and exclusion volumes to carve water away.

A wind-driven ocean synthesised from up to 128 Gerstner components, steered by a single Beaufort dial, with Jacobian foam and a matching CPU evaluator for physics.

The runtime API any gameplay code can call to ask a water body for surface height, normal, depth, flow velocity and immersion at a world position.

A library of Unreal-specific procedures the agent reads before it acts, so it follows a known-good recipe for your project instead of guessing its way through the editor.

The 5.8 build is a ground-up rebuild on Unreal's own toolset reflection, with the coding agent bundled inside the plugin instead of bolted on beside it.

Drop a river spline and the terrain carves itself a bed with authored banks and material layers — no third-party landscape-brush plugin required and no manual sculpting.

One component on any character: swim, wade, dive, sprint, surface-lock, breathe, drown, and ragdoll into a corpse that drifts on the waves — in multiplayer, on every water body type.

Crates, debris and vehicles float according to their actual shape with no pontoons to author. Boats still get the pontoon system, now with an in-viewport editor for placing them by dragging.

Simulate a region in the editor, bake the settled result, and ship hundreds of rivers and ponds that still answer buoyancy and gameplay queries while only the ones near the player run the solver.

Volumetric fog that reads real scene depth through the surface, and god rays from the sun that stay anchored in the world instead of smearing as the camera moves.

Large water surfaces cost less: tiles the camera cannot see are culled entirely, and detail concentrates near the viewer instead of being spread evenly across the whole surface.

Waves steepen, curl and break at the shore with foam that follows the coastline — and the CPU sees the same breaking wave the GPU renders, so buoyancy and swimming agree with what you can see.

Water behaves correctly in a World Partition world — it HLODs at distance, streams with the level, and AI can query whether a location is in water for pathing.

Author a wave setup once as an asset with its own preview editor, reuse it across bodies and levels, and bake any wave system to textures for lower-end targets.

Read the real water surface directly inside Niagara — spawn splash, spray, foam or debris that sit on the actual animated waves without Blueprint round-trips.

Underwater light patterns: an editor tool that bakes caustic textures from a photon scatter, plus analytical and texture-driven sampling in the water and underwater materials.

How foam is produced across the plugin: Jacobian whitecaps from the wave field, shoreline bands from the breaking-wave profile, foam carried by the shallow-water solver, and foam left behind by objects.

The close-up detail layer: one shared baked wave patch, replayed as a flipbook, turned into a detail normal map and advected along the local flow.

What the plugin puts on the wire by itself - sea state and swimmer state - and what your game still has to synchronise.

The in-editor tools the plugin ships: viewport pontoon editing, spline width, depth and flow handles, the wave preset editor, bakers and generators.

The console variables and in-viewport visualisers shipped for diagnosing water, all namespaced so they never collide with anything else loaded in the same process.

Lite is not a rename. It inherits Pro’s rebuilt rendering pipeline, all the performance work, the full lake system and every fix from the shared codebase — at no cost to Legacy owners.

Fixes to the shared core reach Lite and Pro at the same time. No more waiting for a fix to be ported across two separate codebases.

Yes — the full GPU fluid solver is in Lite. Place a simulation actor over a lake or beach and the water flows, pools and reacts to real terrain geometry.

Ripples, wakes and splashes anywhere in the level, including the open ocean — with nothing to set up per area.

The waterfall system stays exclusive to Riverology. Oceanology Pro will not ship it, and Riverology 3 rebuilds it on the new core with splash and mist.

Riverology 3 runs on the same rebuilt foundation as Oceanology Pro, with the river and lake half of it as the product. One codebase instead of two.

The hydraulics authoring kit: Source, Force (including Vortex) and Wave contributors, placed as actors and driven from Blueprint.

Performance-friendly ocean simulation tuned for games that need consistent frame rates on mid-range hardware. Wave presets and wave baking included.

The complete lake toolset, identical to the one in Pro — shorelines, depth, swimming and buoyancy.

Both buoyancy paths ship in Lite: pontoons for boats, and physics-accurate volumetric flotation for any rigid body with nothing to author.

The same one-component swimming, diving, sprinting and drowning system as Pro, on every water body type Lite supports.

The same volumetric fog, god rays and waterline treatment as Pro. Native passes currently compile for Win64, non-server, Shader Model 5+.

VFX can read the real water surface inside Niagara, and the caustics generation workflow is included.

Riverology 3 changes how rivers carve terrain, with the intent of working on more than the engine-native landscape that Riverology 2 requires.

Draw a spline, set width, depth and velocity at each point, and the current becomes something gameplay can actually feel.

Animation is the thinnest part of the tool surface today. Inspection of AnimBP state machines works; IK Retargeter and AnimGraph authoring are not supported yet.

Oceanology Legacy 5.8.1 — engine compatibility for Unreal Engine 5.8. No new features; the next feature release is Lite 6.0.0.

The shipped tool surface: roughly 900 tools across about 65 toolsets, covering Blueprints, materials, actors and world, widgets, Niagara, levels, assets and more.