Wow, that next-to-last shot just _screams_ "Mario Sunshine" to me.
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Originally posted by: Grey NinjaColor in many cases is set with 4 numbers. RGBA. Zelda probably uses a palette rather than RGBA, but the principle remains the same. the 4th color, Alpha Blending, is used to specify the transparancy of the object. Alpha Blending is fairly easy to do, and it's supported in hardware on the GameCube. Having transparent water wouldn't take that much power at all I don't think.
It might've been easy to make the water transparent, but what it shows makes all the difference. Transparent water in The Wind Waker... well, imagine the world ocean. Now they would've had to have shown _something_ below the water, rendered the polygons that went under the water in each frame, the extra things on the horizon that you'd be able to see because it was now transparent...
I don't know, I understood why they used the untransparent water in The Wind Waker, and I kind of dug it, it looked nice. (It's probably the part of the style change I like the most.) They already proved they could do nice water effects in Mario Sunshine (which resulted in some terrible framerates in spots, remember using your hover pack in certain places like Ricco Harbor, and even if you were facing away from the water, with all of the refracting going on it'd just bog down suddenly). They would've also forced some "diving" element into Wind Waker if they had transparent water, and diving's always been awkward in Zelda games, so it was nice to skip on it for once.
But I'm very happy to see this, this is something that was missing while Interact was in control of the Gameshark in America. All they did was pump out Infinite Health, Infinite Lives, Infinite Ammo, Unlock all Characters, bam, move on. Infinite Lives, Infinite Continues, Unlock all Stages, bam, move on. They didn't go for the interesting codes, and they refused to let gamers hack their own codes even when they finally figured out how, threatening some with lawsuit initially if they released their codes. They pulled this through the DC and some of the PS2's time, but finally, now that Datel's handling it again, we're seeing some old-school, Game Genie-style "Let's see what weird things we can dig out" codes. Altering physics in Mario Sunshine, a debug area in Wind Waker, I'm actually interested in getting a PAR again after I swore off GSes due to Interact's pathetic performance and policies with them.