🐛 Bug Fixes & Visual Polish - NextGen 2.0
We've been listening closely to community feedback, and NextGen 2.0 will bring meaningful fixes to some of the most frequently reported visual issues.
🌊 LOD System — White Gradient Artifact
A visual glitch causes a white gradient to appear on the water surface during rapid camera altitude changes. This artifact becomes more noticeable when adjusting QuadTree Tile Size values and interacts unexpectedly with foam rendering.
NextGen 2.0 introduces stabilized LOD transitions that eliminate this artifact across all camera movement speeds and tile configurations.
🚢 Water Masking — Enclosed Spaces
Water currently renders inside enclosed geometry like boat hulls and interior cabins. The existing MI_MaskingObjects approach struggles with complex multi-room structures and thin-wall geometry, sometimes producing erratic camera behavior.
NextGen 2.0 delivers an improved masking system with reliable interior detection, ensuring water stays outside where it belongs.
🎨 Underwater Visuals — Independent Controls
The current underwater rendering ties several visual parameters together, limiting artistic flexibility. Specifically: underside visibility is locked to fog density, underwater color cannot change at runtime, and bright skies cause overly white refraction.
NextGen 2.0 separates these controls, adding independent underside blend, runtime-adjustable underwater color for biome transitions, and improved refraction handling under various lighting conditions.
☀️ Godrays — World-Space Anchoring
Underwater godrays currently move with the camera, which breaks the sense of being in a real underwater environment. Additionally, they only appear within fogged areas, limiting their use in clear shallow water.
NextGen 2.0 anchors godrays in world-space so they remain stationary as the camera moves, creating a natural parallax effect and proper underwater immersion.
🌫️ Fog System — Visibility Corrections
Several fog-related visual bugs have been reported: distant objects sometimes remain visible through dense fog, transparent materials bleed through incorrectly, and a hard line artifact appears at the water surface intersection.
NextGen 2.0 addresses all three issues with proper depth handling, corrected render order for transparent geometry, and smooth gradient blending at surface boundaries.
💬 Community Driven
These improvements come directly from detailed community reports and feedback. Thank you to everyone who took the time to document issues and share suggestions — your input shapes the future of Oceanology.