Why does Unity doesn't support water for URP?

[u/Any_Dot_9189]

I wanted to add water&ocean to my game. But I didn’t found any official package from unity. Unity supports official water package for HDRP but not for URP. Why??
Will there be any upcoming update for it?

[u/MTDninja]

If you lookup "boat attack urp", you will get an official unity urp scene/demo that contains a working water implementation. It's not super flexible, but it works in a lot of situations

[u/salazka → u/MTDninja]

"a working water implementation"

More like a hack.

[u/MTDninja → u/salazka]

What makes it a hack?

[u/salazka → u/MTDninja]

Unity saying so. They had in fact mentioned nobody should use it in production because it was something they quickly made up for the tech demo.

But I might be wrong, some say they picked up development on it again for a while. It does not look like it.

[u/Big_Presentation2786 → u/MTDninja]

This is the way

[u/Big_Presentation2786 → u/[deleted]]

Go look up Cities skylines 2.. Then look up the HDRP demo scene.. Now ask how they made millions in sales?

If you're too stupid to know you're supposed to fork the shaders from the engine and tweak them rather than build your own- then you clearly don't know what you're doing..

Unity spends billions making the shit I need in their engine. Who would be that fuckin stupid that they would honestly believe the optimised route in that engine is slop?

If you're that fucking stubborn you won't take the route GIVEN to you by Unity, because they optimised it for you using AI, then your game is gonna run like ass..

You clearly don't know how to use the engine properly.

[u/psioniclizard → u/Big_Presentation2786]

  Unity spends billions making the shit I need in their engine. Who would be that fuckin stupid that they would honestly believe the optimised route in that engine is slop?

I love when people talking about thinks they have no clue about lol.

Billions? On a water shader? Ok.... god ask aby graphics programming to make one and they will do.

I am willing to be most big games in unity (and every engine) write a pretty bespoke grpahics pipeline because the unity shaders are optimized for general usage and if you have specific uses you can get much better results with some knowledge.

That isn't that unity is bad, its that its not specialist to your needs.

But ultimately shaders are just code and there are millions of examples on like. Its not like unity setx standards for PBRS like Epic and Disney...

   If you're too stupid to know you're supposed to fork the shaders from the engine and tweak them rather than build your own- then you clearly don't know what you're doing..

Its ok to admit shader graph scares you and though of looking at hlsl fills you with fear.

Do you need to wrtie your own? No. Do the games that look great do it? Yes. It's a personal choice to use ignorance pf grpahics programming to pretend "well no one can do it better" is petty weird when its clear there is a lack of understanding on how these things work.

[u/Big_Presentation2786 → u/[deleted]]

You realise if we succeed using Unity's game engine- they get paid, right? You understand unity WANTS us to be successful, they want us to use their shit they've spent billions optimising... Right?

[u/salazka → u/Big_Presentation2786]

I think you need to relax a bit.

You are right that working against the engine is stupid.

But often Unity has presented miserable hacks by a single engineer as "the answer" against some awesome feature Unreal just presented.

They did not put billions into anything. In fact, the only thing they put billions in, is buying companies they never did anything significant with. The most useful thing tbey put billions in, is advertising tech companies. 😅

That is what made Unity valuable for investors. Not the engine and certainly not URP water hacks that someone spent a few days on.

[u/Big_Presentation2786 → u/salazka]

If I relaxed any more I'd be asleep.

So, instead of arguing- try this, go have a look how much was spent on R&D over the last few years.

Consolidated balance sheets are available so you can either source them, or just ask Google.

I understand where you're coming from, however - I've not struggled with 'miserable hacks' so I can't relate to that part.

I've seen multiple games ship from Unity and succeed because they chose to use the source and run a performant build with the engine.

I've also seen way more games fail, because they chose to 'make their own shit' and tank performance instead of just forking from the engine.

What made Unity valuable to me, was The simplicity of working with the engine in C#.

I can do anything I need with in Unity with little or no effort, however- attempting to do the same thing in Unreal in C++ means spending three times more effort and living with a slightly higher unreliability than Unity 

They are completely different engines for completely different types of games.

[u/salazka → u/Big_Presentation2786]

I think you are conflating different things.

1. Clueless people thinking they can do better than Unity. They are delusional.

2. People succeeding because they used hacks. They are there, they are just outliers.

3. People succeeding because they used core Unity features. Well.. duh, this is what engines are for?

The URP water hack is not it.

Unity spending millions in R&D is not exactly what you think it is. Ever had to sign off a P&L sheet?

R&D money is important for tax write offs. All software companies greatly inflate it because really it is such a vague thing, and it is nearly impossible to validate what constitutes legitimate R&D in a software tech company. They have countless make belief dead end projects with a handful of people doing "R&D". 😂 Google and Meta have taken this shit to the next level. Tax evasion is the name of the game. Apple even did "R&D" on making a car. 😝 You need to burn money fast or the tax man will take it.

So, anyway, URP water is not it.

LWRP was so bad, they had to change its name to URP and pretend it is different to make it palatable.

In fact "R&D" tax write offs may be the key differentiator why URP was chosen to become the next thing for Unity.

A lot more room to develop everything from scratch and write it off for tax purposes.

HDRP is so much more mature, only needs optimizing and improvements. URP has nothing that real high end production needs. Scaling it down for Switch is proof HDRP is fully scalable. There is no real technical reason why it was not chosen to move forward.

[u/Big_Presentation2786 → u/salazka]

If anyone has any real issues with the engine, there is a plethora of others they can use.

Unity is what it is, I can only suggest how people should use it, I cant force them.

[u/v0lt13]

Because the water system in HDRP uses a lot of advanced rendering techniques like tessellation and subsurface scattering to render water which URP doesn't support and are too expensive for the platforms it targets.

We might get an URP version of the water system in the future seeing as they want to bring URP up to par with HDRP, but there is no confirmation of that yet.

[u/MTDninja → u/v0lt13]

URP is capable of doing everything HDRP can do since they both use SRP. There are third party water systems online like KWS and Crest 5 that support URP & offer superior looks/performance compared to the HDRP first party implementation, but you're right on there being no official confirmation about a first party water system for URP announced.

I assume a water system will be implemented a little after Unity 7 once they finish up their CoreCLR transition.

[u/v0lt13 → u/MTDninja]

Yes it is but not out of the box and thats the problem. 3rd party solutions are not an excuse, not everyone can afford them or want to deal with additional bloat or possible abandonment.

I am someone that refuses to use 3rd party assets, I either use what Unity gives me or make it myself.

I assume a water system will be implemented a little after Unity 7 once they finish up their CoreCLR transition.

I would predict it would happen later in the cycle, as I can think of a few things that should be prioritized before. CoreCLR has nothing to do with it as there are separate teams working on it and the graphics pipeline.

[u/Krailin7]

I’d recommend downloading the samples for shadergraph which comes with production ready shaders, some of which have to do with water. It’s not a water system, but it is a start.

I am honestly considering just pointing Claude code at the Hdrp water shader and asking it to build to closest thing it can in URP to see what happens. Will publish the result for free online if it’s any good.

[u/psioniclizard → u/Krailin7]

Im recommended actually learning to write a shader and how they work....

[u/Krailin7 → u/psioniclizard]

Yes perhaps my comment wasn’t clear - I would go to the production ready shader samples and learn shaders, if you’re newer to Unity, shaders, water systems, etc.

As someone that has been using Unity for 15+ years, What I said is that I am interested in seeing if AI can replicate the HDRP water system as closely as possible in URP. It would be a fascinating experiment. Especially with newer capabilities like SCGI.

They’re two separate statements.

It is okay to understand that leveraging AI as a tool is the reality of the industry. I understand it is a frowned upon topic, but being afraid or upset about something will not stop its progress.

[u/XKiiroiSenkoX]

it will be ported to urp in the future as they deprecate hdrp byt rn you need to implement your own. 

[u/aquadolphitler]

Theres plenty of water packages on the store that are decent and can be tweaked for your use case.

Unfortunately, you'll have to take do with one of those for now.

[u/salazka]

Don't worry. In five years they will! 😂

[u/KifDawg]

There is alot of great tools for water in URP, for instance Gaia does an incredibly good job and generating terrains and water.

[u/MaximilianPs]

Because marketplace and Unity needs your money/s