No water bug

Haha, Noble. But in games like Minecraft/Terraria/Starbound and pretty much any retro/8bit top-down game, water can be handled discretely without much stress on the computer. Even when you see water/snow physics demo'd like this or this run so well, it makes you consider that anything can be optimized.

And Daniel, thank you so much for sharing that! I really like hearing stuff like that because it's so interesting. It's a little scary that some devs opt for the "cheap" approach of rendering things, but I can understand the economical reasons behind it - both money wise and hardware wise.

But it also brings questions to mind, especially because what you said only effects the camera. When you observe a player's avatar body hitting the water plane you notice the effects are immediate, and doesn't require the camera to be above or below the waterplane in order to take effect. So I assume there's different parts of code handling players other than what handles the camera.

There is something else that is surprising about waterplanes though. I used to be able to detach my camera from my avatar body by using an old teleporter glitch, and it allowed me to reach the dimensions of the waterplane! Unfortunately, I'm not able to reproduce it anymore, but it looked like this (the image is edited to look like it):



If my assumption is correct, the waterplane graphic is clientside and radially spreads out relative to the avatar's position. But the waterplane spreads out far enough that a rule-abiding player would never be able to find this out. Also... the blue filter was still applied when you moved the camera underwater.

In fact, when I first experienced this I really had high hopes because this showed that waterplanes did have dimensions applied to it! At least graphically anyway. Which meant that maybe it would lead to creators being able to edit a waterplane's dimensions and having multiple waterboxes in order to create cooler looking games. But alas, as you've said in the past, and implied in your post here, the waterplane isn't going to be improved anytime soon. ):

TL;DR: Waterplanes have dimensions, but doesn't mean anything significant - yet.

Edit: Just realized you might be interested about the old teleporter glitch. Part of it still exists, which I'll report later when I can find a non-accidental list of reproduceable steps. Basically, you can exploit the camera's behavior by locking it to a wall when you enter and exit a teleporter that is close to a thin wall. From there you can slowly move the camera along the wall until it reaches some distance or angle that causes it to fly back to your avatar. It used to be that it would permanently stick to the wall until you moved the camera off it or suicided - but that's not the case anymore.