Changing the color of water

Just wondering if anybody has tried to change the color of water, and if you were successfull. Yeah, you can get the effect in shallow water by changing the tileset, but I want to be able to change the color of deep water.

I dont think that it will be any harder than just skinning the water like you skin everything else.

Actually, there is a problem, there are like 25 different water skins for each tileset, because there is one skin per animation. Yea, its dumb, but thats the only way. It will take a while to re-color them all and import them each time, but thats the only way.

Humm... if you take a look on the war3.mpq, you will find the TerrainArt\Water.slk. I have never done any editing in this file, but I think it ocntrols some information like the color of water, the alpha value, the height, etc. Maybe you should take a look over it.

Actually, water is in:

ReplaceableTextures\Water\A_water00.blp
ReplaceableTextures\Water\A_water01.blp
ReplaceableTextures\Water\A_water02.blp
ReplaceableTextures\Water\A_water03.blp
ReplaceableTextures\Water\A_water04.blp
ReplaceableTextures\Water\A_water05.blp
ReplaceableTextures\Water\A_water06.blp

All the way to #44, and thats only for one tileset

Yeah, here's a screenshot of my ulgy-yellow-water in the lordareon Summer map. Done by editing water.slk, very easy actually, it's full of coments by blizzard

Wow! Does it animate/hit the shoreline/have waves?
If so, then why does blizzard need so many skins of different colors? Hmmm...

yeah, it looks just like 'normal' water. The only difference I noticed is that the color won't change on the minimap (in-game), but I think that if you re-save the map, the changes will be done.

[edit]

Yeah, I was just looking on the textures, and I really don't know what are these textures about. Perhaps warcraft uses diferent textures for diferent tilesets, but the color of the water is stored on that file. Actually, if you look at the water I got, it looks kind of ugly, perhaps this could be because we have a yellow color (the edited .slk) on top of a blue color(the skin file). And about the minimap, if you save the map after changing the water, the color of water on mini-map will change.

u can change the color of deep water in one of the miscdata files, most people dont know, but there are 3 of them, ui\miscdata.txt, units\miscdata.txt and ui\miscui.txt

Hmm, good stuff here! Most of this seems somewhat new to the community, as far as how the color of water works. Good job on figuring it out!

Ok, this makes much more sense now. The color of the water is determined by taking the color of the water (set in TerrainArt\Water.slk). In there you can set the color of the water that appears in the minimap (mmAlpha, mmRed, mmGreen, mmBlue).

You can also specify min/max color ranges in determing the water color for both shallow and deep water. Now, when the color of the water is calculated, the engine interpolates the difference between the colors defined in the TerrainArt\Water.slk file based on the depth settings in UI\MiscData.txt. Currently, shallow is defined to be between the ranges of 10 and 64, and deep between 64 and 72.

The alpha values for both shallow and deep water in the Water.slk file (each has min and max) appears to be used to determine how much the terrain beneath it affects the color after applying the depth coloring.

I'm going to play around with this and see if I can't post a detailed FAQ about this. This will be very usefull.

Thanks for everyones input.

Ok, everything works as I expected, except for the Alpha values. You can actually think of them as setting the transparency of the water, with 0 being absolutely transparent, and 255 hiding any terrain beneath.

I have attached a jpeg of the world editor showing my water being a pinkish color. The only problem is, I can't get the color to come through when I load up my map in a game. Still working on that.

My next post will explain what I have figured out in regards to all of the variables in the TerrainArt\Water.slk file.

In order to change the color of your water, extract the file TerrainArt\Water.slk from the war3.mpg. If you want your editor to use values you specify in this file, place in the your root Warcraft 3 directory under TerrainArt\Water.slk.

When you open the file (Excell is best), you will notice on the left hand side a column titled waterID. These correspond with the predefined tilesets available. So far, this is what I've been able to figure out.

LSha = Lordaeron Summer
FSha = Lordaeron Fall
WSha = Lordaeron Winter
NSha = Northrend
ASha = Ashenvale
DSha = Dalaran
CSha = Cityscape
BSha = Barrens

I haven't figured out which tileset YSha, XSha, VSha, QSha, and GSha associate with yet.

Following are the columns of note, and what they do:

mmAlpha Sets the effective transparency of your water in the minimap.
mmRed Sets the Red value for the color of your water as it will appear in the minimap.
mmGreen Sets the Green value
mmBlue Sets the Blue value

Smin_A This sets the minimum Alpha value for your shallow water. At the most shallow point, this value will be applied to determine how the terrain is seen below. 0 is very transparent, 255 is least transparent (effectively hiding the terrain).
Smin_R Sets the minimum Red value to be used for shallow water. Combined with Smin_G and Smin_B below, this will be the color at the most shallow point (closest to ground).
Smin_G minimum Green value for shallow water (near the surface of water).
Smin_B minimum Blue value for shallow water (near the surface of water).

Smax_A This sets the maximum Alpha value for your shallow water. At the deepest point in what is considered to be shallow water, this will determine how much of the terrain to reveal. Depth values can be found in the file UI\MiscData.txt file.
Smax_R Sets the maximum Red value to be used for shallow water. Combined with Smax_G and Smax_B below, this will be the color at the deepest point of shallow water.
Smax_G maximum Green value for shallow water(deepest point in shallow).
Smax_B maximum Blue value for shallow water (deepest point in shallow).

Dmin_A This sets the minimum Alpha value for your deep water. At the point where shallow water becomes considered to be deep water, this determines how much of the terrain to reveal (0 being very transparent, 255 being least transparent).
Dmin_R Sets the minimum Red value to be used for deep water. Combined with Dmin_G and Dmin_B below, this will be the color at the point where shallow water meets deep water.
Dmin_G minimum Green value for deep water (highest point in deep).
Dmin_B minimum Blue value for deep water (highest point in deep).

Dmax_A This sets the maximum Alpha value for your deep water. This is considered to be the equivilant of the bottom (0 being very transparent, 255 being least transparent). You will notice that most values are around 250, meaning you don't see the terrain through deep water.
Dmax_R Sets the maximum Red value to be used for deep water. Combined with Dmax_G and Dmax_B below, this will be the color at the deepest point of your deep water (very bottom).
Dmax_G maximum Green value for deep water (very bottom)
[b]Dmax_B[/B maximum Blue value for deep water (very bottom)

Hope this helps somewhat. Keep in mind that you can create the effective of murky water by upping your Alhpa values for even your shallow water. This will allow your units to walk through it, but without being able to see the terrain beneath, or at least masking it more. Setting your Alpha values to 255 for say Smin_A and Smax_A, completely hides the terrain underneath.

Here is an example of using the Alpha values. I have set Smin_A, Smax_A, Dmin_A, and Dmax_A all to 255. As you can see, this has completely masked the terrain underneath, even in shallow water. The darker color is the deep water, since my Dmin and Dmax color ranges are set to a darker color than for the Smin and Smax color ranges.

Also notice that the ripples on the water, and the waves hitting the shoreline match the color of the water.

Nice job! This could be a good tut!