Over the last week or two, I have been revisiting the way liquids are rendered in Adaptory. And I think they look awesome!!

Comparison of old and new liquid shaders in Adaptory (WIP)

I’ve received a lot of feedback about how the gas and liquids weren’t very clear in Alpha 1 and 2. I found that the rendering was quite slow on less powerful computers. And I thought I could make them look a lot better.

I’ve essentially rebuilt the liquid shaders from last year, using some new rendering techniques I’ve learned, and uploading the data using Uniform Buffer Objects (which required a bit of extension to libgdx). Rather than doing a tileset-based lookup (which limits the resolution of the result, causing blockiness), I’m now generating actual polygons that I can then pass along to the graphics card. I’ve added little waves and little bubbles and generally made the liquids feel much nicer.

I’ve still got a few more tweaks and optimisations to do with these, but they’re at a good state now – next, I’ll be applying the same techniques to the way Adaptory renders gases.

These new shaders will be in the next update – Alpha 3 – expected by the end of March.