Realistic Water In Godot For Sid Meier's Pirates-Inspired Game

It's starting to feel like we're developing a tradition of posting about beautiful Godot water once a week. This showcase comes from developer stankuslee, who's making a game inspired by Sid Meier's Pirates! and Sea of Thieves, but with a more "serious" tone. It's called Portolan and features a historically accurate, to-scale Caribbean, with trading, politics, and naval combat.

The tech stack is Godot, with GDScript handling the coordination and GLSL compute shaders powering the wave simulation and foam. A separate shader is used for rendering the water itself.

According to the developer, performance looks solid: they're getting around 120 FPS on an RTX 4070 Ti. They're now improving wave realism and adding shoreline interaction. If you're interested in learning more about creating water in Godot, we recommend checking out Emil J's tutorials:

Also, have a look at projects like this interactive one, this Sea of Thieves-inspired project, and this one featuring whirlpools for more inspiration.

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