Rising Water Demo. How the trick is done.

Ok, so they said it couldn't be done. Well, they were right (whoever 'they'
are). But, you CAN make a room LOOK like it's filling up with water. (By the
way, the T2 demo of this is even cooler!).

The real trick here is having 6 custom objects. First, a little background on
how water works. If you dig into the flow brushes, you see that there are 13
different water .pcx files (for green anyway). And that the flow brush maps
these on to the surface of the flow brush, and changes them every 50
milliseconds. So it looks like flowing water with ripples/waves.

Well, you can produce a similar effect by using the Tweq Models settings. I
took the Skylite model, which is just a large rectangle with 9 128x128
textures mapped onto it, by default Hothou1.pcx. It's also a 12 x 12 model,
which means less scaling problems. I pulled the green water colors out of
waterhw, and converted them to the Thief Palette.

Now, I modified the skylite model so it's skin would be the new water colors
(obj\txt\gwater01-06). And I made 6 of them, one for each of the water colors.
(Objects gwat01.bin through gwat06.bin)
I selected the water colors from grout01, 03, 05, 07, 09, 11. Not as many as
what Thief uses for water, but Tweq will only use 6 models. So the fake water
looks a little more choppy than flow brush water. I also slowed down the model
change rate, so all the water images run through at 100 ms each, approximating
the original water brush change rate.

So now we have a somewhat transparent object that looks like water. I added to
this the Scale Tweq. So the object gets bigger and smaller when the Tweq is
activated. And it looks like the room is filling with water.

However, it doesn't affect AI or Garrett. So it's probably best to prevent
Garrett from ever getting into the fake water. And if you wanted to drown an
AI, you'd have to arrange to set a water stim or something on the AI.

Also, transparency doesn't work well in T1, so when the scaling Tweq gets
turned on, the water loses it's transparency. So it would probably be better
for lava (or quicksand) in T1. However, in T2, it really does look like water.

Go over to the window and hit the switch (3 times, sorry, it takes time to get
the tweq controls sorted out). Watch the room fill with water. It will stop
when full, hitting the switch again will lower it.


- Shadowspawn
