Gav

Not sure but I think that rendering a lot of smaller objects increases drawcalls which can make your game more cpu bound (torque currently depends a lot on single core performance for rendering) so it's better to have larger objects.

EDIT: Torque implements some kind of instancing but it can make the situation even worse https://github.com/GarageGames/Torque3D/issues/678

I found a modified water shader i was experimenting in the past which adds a second foam layer to water. It has the default fields for direction and speed and I think it's easy to add sequence animation or at least fade it in-out. About the shoreline foam maybe we could do something similar but i really think this is beyond my skills :(

http://s16.postimg.org/5cnrpfhr9/foam.jpg i can share this if you find it useful.

I think the Pacific Demo has some kind of wave foam by placing decals with transparency & animation near the terrain. But if you want animated foam on the water without particles you could use a flat mesh with sequence animation material as previously suggested.

You just need to copy an existing variable like this. You can create a new protected boolean variable mUpdateTexture to the class, initialize it with true here and add the field here. Then change this line to:

if ( Platform::compareModifiedTimes( baseCachePath, mTerrFileName ) < 0 && mUpdateTexture )

.

EDIT: You also need to read/write the mUpdateTexture variable to the network stream (TerrainBlock::packUpdate() & TerrainBlock::unpackUpdate())

I think the proper way is to add a new field to the terrain object (a boolean flag). Then you can modify this function to check the flag and enable or disable the basetexture generation.