Unity

Version

Minimum required version is Unity 2020.3.1f1, supported up to 2022.3.

• Support for Unity 2020 will be retired in the summer of 2023
• Updates/fixes for Unity 2019 LTS have been discontinued as of version 1.1.8.

Scriptable Render Pipeline

Only compatible with the Universal Render Pipeline. Support for other render pipelines unfortunately cannot simply be added, since this practically requires a complete rewrite of scripts and shaders, resulting in a new asset altogether.

Verified versions:

• Version 11.x.x (in Unity 2021.1) has no major shader changes, hence it is not being tested on.
• There is little reason to not use an LTS version, hence earlier versions (eg 2022.1) are no longer involved in testing.

Platforms

Mobile

Devices released after 2012 support OpenGLES 3.0. Or typically an iPhone 6s or newer.

The shader is generally optimized, and uses a few principles that also aid performance sensitive hardware. Depending on the device and complexity of the project, it will depend if every feature on the shader can be enabled whilst maintaining proper framerates. See the Performance Guidelines page for more details. Expecting desktop-level graphics on mobile is unfortunately not realistic.

• The water will not turn pixelated the longer the application runs, as is the case with other water shaders. Though this may slowly start to occur after ~6+ hours due to the limited precision of mobile hardware.
• Google TV is not supported, given that URP graphics don’t fully work on the platform to begin with.

Desktop VR
Tested using an Oculus Rift S with the Oculus XR plugin. The Multi-pass, Multiview and Single Pass Instanced rendering techniques are all supported and work the same across all VR plugins. As a means of optimization, orthographic camera’s are not supported when VR is in use.

• The “Shared depth buffer” option must be disabled in the Oculus XR settings, otherwise the water effects appear to lag behind the headset movement.
• Planar reflections are not supported, regular reflections from the skybox or reflection probes work as expected.

Oculus Quest/Meta Quest 2

Tested using an Oculus Quest 2 with the Oculus XR plugin. Multiview rendering must be used, otherwise the water effects appear to lag behind the headset movement (issue with how the depth texture is rendered).

• Any reference to mobile platforms in the documentation also applies to Quest.
• Planar reflections are not supported, regular reflections from the skybox or reflection probes work as expected.

WebGL

WebGL 2.0 is compatible since it uses the OpenGL 3.0 rendering API just like Android/iOS does. WebGL 1.0 is not compatible and should be removed as a Graphics API in the Player settings.

WebGL does not support compute shaders. Though, at the time, this asset does not contain any functionality reliant on it.

MacOS
Compatible with both OpenGL 4.1 and Metal.

tvOS remains untested, though it also uses the Metal graphics API, so there’s a slim chance this will pose any specific issues.

Consoles
No graphical or platform-specific issues were encountered.

Shader runs without any issues on Nintendo Switch. With all features enabled, the shader does not incur a noticeable performance hit (also in handheld mode). Though this may vary per project. Any references to mobile devices in the documentation should also apply to it.

Other assets

Fog post processing effects
See this page for a list of compatible assets.

Typically, any third-party fog/volumetric lighting solutions will ignore the water. Or shade the water surface with fog, based on what’s behind it (barely noticeable for shallow water). This behaviour which applies to all transparent materials, since they do not write to the depth texture these effects rely on.

If an asset is not listed here, please get in touch so that I can investigate if an integration is possible.

Some assets have a closed code structure for fog shading, rather than exposing a re-usable code function for applying fog to a surface. In C# terms, this is comparable to not having a public and abstract API. Thus these asset can’t be integrated into any other shader, unless refactored by the author.

Use cases

Camera’s

• Rendering the water on an Overlay camera is not possible, due to limitations imposed by URP’s camera stacking system.
• Overlay geometry will cause artifacts when refraction is enabled on the water material, since they’re rendered after the water. A setup using the Render Objects feature otherwise works perfectly.

Features

Tessellation
May not appear to have any effect when using an incompatible graphics API or GPU (not supporting Shader Model 4.6+). In this case it is automatically disabled, so it can be enabled without worrying about a pink material on some devices.

Tessellation cannot work with waves if GPU Instancing is enabled on the water material, due to a limitation of Unity’s rendering architecture.