Subnautica and Snell's Window
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 ต.ค. 2021
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Thanks to my friends DavoGato, Wolfgang, and Vince for helping me write this script!
Snell's Window is a curious optical phenomenon that occurs when you look up at the water's surface from underwater, and the action-exploration game Subnautica emulates the effect very convincingly. Join me for a dive into the science behind this phenomenon and its implementation in Subnautica!
{ ? I ♥ } - เกม
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I love that he’s made a character to be inside of the games he’s describing, it’s a genius way to give examples of the sound design he’s trying to teach
It's what happened to Phineas after he finished school.
I agree, brilliant and clever
Also cant Forget he Did the Table from his 'Mario Kart and the Doppler Effect' Video, Like he Recorded That Video in Subnautica, Love Little Details that Add nothing but just something that makes people go: "Hey I've Seen that Before", Such a Good Channel
We don’t deserve Scruffy
some magic school bus type shit
The effort put into rendering that circle so beautifully makes sense when you consider that it's often the last thing you see before you die
*Oxygen.*
**Warning. 30 seconds of oxygen remaining.**
*Caution, Vital signs critical*
Yeah it really adds to how realistic drowning feels. The way the sounds start to dull and your vision starts to go black... makes you feel like you actually can't breathe, it messed me up the first time
Just... man, everything I learn about Subnautica just screams "these developers care about what they're making." What a great game. Everything should be made with so much love.
And then you play the sequel and get the opposite impression.
@@Mwapavo123well it does feel pretty rushed, it did take a lot less time to make than the original subnautica
Subnautica is a great reminder, to me, what open world games can be when they're not just open world for the sake of being open world. This is honestly something that pisses me off. Why do people make open world games, then fail to do anything interesting with them? If your experience is gonna be semi-linear anyway, don't make the game open world. Do what OoT did and make the game with several sections that the player can explore in the order they choose, even if the outcome is more or less the same.
This is also the reason why i don't like BotW. It's open world, but fails to do anything interesting with its open world. Navigating it feels like just another way to increase play time. Subnautica however does it well. The open world is big enough to get lost in, but small enough so that the devs could hand craft it piece by piece. You'll be exploring it step by step, conquering the world slowly with each advance you make.
Another game that does this very same thing well, though it's a bit more guided in its approach than Subnautica is, is Ancestors: A Humankind Odyssee (which i will just call Ancestors from here on out). For those who never played it, in Ancestors, you basically play an early hominid on its evolutionary path towards becoming the first humans (That being the first creatures of the clade homo, not the first homo sapiens).
The gameplay loop is pretty simple. You need to find food, water, and safe sleeping spots, all while avoiding predators. In the process, by doing all sorts of things, such as using tools, jumping from tree to tree, eating new food you find, etc, you unlock new perks, which simulate the evolution of mankind. The world is massive, and it'd probably take you ages to get from one end to the other (Though i do currently plan on making the trip back all the way to the initial spawn hideout after reaching the other end of the map) though, for most of the game, you'll really only explore within maybe half an hour of your home base at best.
However, your spawn base does move, and you only have limited control over it. As you evolve further, your spawn slowly moves east, away from the jungles and towards dryer climates, as to simulate the climate shift that forced hominids to do things like walk upright in the first place, though it's probably entirely possible for you to just migrate back constantly.
Two things i do have to critisize about the game though:
1: The gameplay gets pretty repetitive after a while. At first, exploring the world around you is interesting, but the gameplay loop is the same for most of it. Find new item, use tool on item, acquire new food source from item, repeat. Pretty much how the entire game works. This does get repetitive after a while.
2: The game has a tutorial you can turn on, yes, but even then, it throws you into the game and leaves the learning how it works up to you. I get they're trying to simulate the fact you're an early hominid being smart enough to start understanding the world around him, but at times, the game has too little tutorial even then. For instance, it would be useful if the game told me i can kill other animals by counterattacking with a weapon in hand, letalone how to do so (Move forward and hold the action key at the same time, then release the action key once you hear a specific sound cue, for those who want to know) but the game gives you very little indication of this abstraction even with sound on.
I agree, especially all the time they spent explaining why each creature has the features it does, I enjoyed reading many of the scanning logs lol
@@Mwapavo123 I mean, that could also be due to having already created assets and reusing or repurposing them.
To me, Snells window in subnautica heavily hammered in the idea that "The only escape is up"
Go out the Snell's Window or you're climbing Jacob's Ladder
@@dolphinboi-playmonsterranc9668 Solid joke but can people please stop stealing my ladders? I owe thousands to my local Home Depot because of this shit
And when you go too deep or in a cave it’s gone or cannot not be seen.
Your primary escape is now gone.
That was an exceptional lesson on refraction! I'd also like to add some information on the game development part!
We usually "fake" these effects by mixing a lot of effects together to pass the impression of the wanted effect at the end! In this case, there's a distance range in which the camera shows a mask, the white-black part which Scruffy shows sometimes in the video. This mask is applied to the view if the player is in range and intersecting the water plane (the surface of the water). Add a bit of sky, fade to blue depending on the distance and voila! You have a pretty convincing Snell's window!
There's no need for calculations of light in real time, otherwise, our computers would cry for help! hahahah
And that's why ray-tracing, RTX is disruptive! It's enabling such tremendous calculations in real time!
I was thinking something similar, my first guess was "this looks a bit like like a 1 - fresnel with an animated noise cutoff"
I figured it was something relatively simple, still, amazing that the devs put so much thought into the details of the game!
How would you suggest to implement stuff like refracted light effects then? I can imagine using prebaked shaders a la mirror's edge must work wonders for games with set levels and lighting conditio s, but what about stuff like large scale worlds with dynamic day/night cycles?
Forgive my likely ignorance, I just begun my journey into game dev studying on my own so there's plenty I still don't know
@@npc6817 Correct, dynamic open worlds like this generally don't use baked lighting. But there's no need for any prebaked stuff, the mask would be applied in real time to the water surface's material. For stuff like day/night cycles you can take the main light's direction and color and the shader will use those two variable in real time, no need to calculate every single light ray and refraction.
@@OrdonWolf ok I get it more now
Hi Scruffy! Just some constructive feedback from a Physics teacher.
Your vector diagram shows light travelling from deep in the ocean upwards to the surface and outwards into air. This seems to imply that we shoot lasers from our eyes to see things. While most educated folks might recognise that you're using the arrows to represent the players viewing angle and that the path for light is the same in either direction, for others, this might lead to misconceptions.
The reality is the arrows go the other way. Light from anywhere above the surface will bend in the same way but in reverse as it enters the water. As a result, light from the surface cannot travel sideways and you can only see light from the surface in this cone above you.
Keep up the awesome work!
While this may not be the case in reality, but in video games? This would make total sense for people who has a better understanding of how internal game engines work. They don't have a script that casts these lasers from the sun in all directions and calculate all the pretty colours and shadows, that would be just a waste of processing. The usual way most people would do would be to shoot those lasers from our cameras, or POVs and do the math from there.
So, scientifically speaking, not very accurate, but in game design? Much more sense.
It’s amazing how much detail was put into this game, and all you do is swim around waiting for some big fish or fuckin Cthulhu to reawaken
But to be fair, a lot of games featuring water have this detail.
@@DMGaina I doubt they have as much effort as in Subnautica though. Not because like "Subnautica is the perfect game" or something, but because... Well, it's in the name. Nautical. The sea. The whole game (Minus some places) takes place in the water, so there's going to be a lot more detail than in other games
@@hazeltree7738 I find the out of water sections to be extremely underdeveloped. The game clearly is meant to be in the water
That is NOT all you do in Subnautica. Not by a longshot.
youve obviously never played subnautica if you think "all you do is swim around"
When you introduced math, I started to do that thing when I furrow my eyebrows to try to understand something, but I gave up halfway through the video and just enjoyed the pretty colors. Seriously though, amazingly well done video!
Me too, actually. I learned a few things, but most of it was lost on me. Such a fascinating idea and game!
WHAAAT YOURE HERE??
I'm absolutely in favor of science teacher Scruffy. Your vids on sound design are always interesting and engaging, and today I learned that the same holds true regardless of the topic. It really is just that you're incredibly good at describing "what you love".
I was just tricked into watching a physics video. Well played.
Every Scruffy video is just a masterpiece… The quality is really insane. I learn so much and yet still it’s such a relaxing experience. Keep it up 💙 You’re gonna do great things
I'd say he already is! :D
Honestly i would love to see even just one video about you covering Outer Wilds and its magic behind its simulation
I was just about to comment this. There's so many beautiful aspects of Outer Wilds, the soundtrack, simulation and the way it teaches you information.
Ah, Outer Wilds. :)
I'm currently playing through the DLC, it is genuinely my favourite game of all time without a shadow if a doubt
@@lizardlegend42 i can relate to this
Is the game worth getting??
8:02 you know you've played too much subnautica when this silhouette of a reaper genuinely jumpscares you
Of all the things I expected from this channel, optical physics wasn't one of them. I am impressed, often times not even textbooks are so remarkably clear in their explanations of wavevectors in a dielectric boundary. Great work.
2:16 Small correction: When we say that light always takes the path of least time, that's in reference to how a beam of light would manifest macroscopically. On the quantum level, any given photon will go wherever it wants, even if the path it takes is totally wack. You can calculate how much that path contributes to the total with the photon wave equation or phase vector analysis, but either way since the physical process of refraction is probabilistic [as is every other optical effect], it doesn't obey the laws most people learn when you consider it fundamentally rather than on our scale of reality.
Another note, photons do not slow down through mediums. Put at its simplest, what you're seeing is the apparently velocity of wavefronts of light being emitted in all directions along a vector where the phases of the light wavefronts happen to superpose constructively. However, the photons that compose the refracted light are mostly not actually travelling in the direction of the beam. This gives rise to something called phase velocity, which is a different concept to the actual speed of light, which is lorentz invariant; it is always the same no matter what.
your fingers must hurt
Thank you. I was really frustrated by the explanation of snells law (or I guess lack thereof while still trying to explain the phenomenon caused by it). It's just I wish people would either give no explanation and just explain the result or actually give you a model of how things work instead of giving a incorrect explanation.
i like your words, funky man
@@solsystem1342 There's no reason to discuss quantum mechanics when doing macroscopic optics - that would be losing the forest for a leaf's mitochondrion. Providing the relevant principles from optics to the situation at hand shows people who want to know more where to look to dive deeper, and doesn't leave anyone confused about where the result came from.
@@le__birb well yes but, they didn't have to give a blatantly wrong result. They could have just used "light takes the shortest path" as a start and then explained that using an analogy. Rather then making up some stuff about the "horizontal speed" of light needing to stay constant.
bruh Scruff has gotten so good in video editing it feels like I'm watching a short movie
I never considered why this was before - thank you for enLIGHTening me, heheh.
Hope this means we get some sound videos on this masterpiece in the future, now that you're back! The audio design at play with hearing these creature sounds echo through the ocean is really fascinating, and I'd love to see you crack this one open and explain what's going on here in that gentle, friendly way only you can.
This is an amazing analysis of the game, and really helped me understand refraction in water. Very cool!
I saw the thumbnail and just thought it was some video essay about Subnautica, but then I saw it was Scruffy and I JUMPED
this is the quality 3 AM educational content i've come to expect from TH-cam.
honestly, WOW. i cant even begin to describe how you even do all these amazing graphics, let alone the actual thing you are trying to explain. its amazing
Scruffy explaining the Law of Refraction makes more sense then my Physics teacher
scruffy:
ratio-
me:
(violent sobbing)
Just randomly discovered this incredible masterpiece, and now I've got to explore the rest of this channel. 10/10.
This video was so well executed and clean, down to the "what i love" outro :) cannot wait for the day when i can support you outside of just liking and commenting!
Stuff like this really makes you appreciate the small stuff that goes into games, really good work here.
Man, playing this through my new speakers made me realize just how much BASS there is in the sound mixing (especially the intro). Not that shaky, I-want-my-muffler-to-fall-off-my-Honda-Civic-when-I-play-this-in-the-car bass, but that rich and creamy stuff.
Makes it even more chilled out. Excellent.
you know. i just realized how much i love the concept of "in order to get up of and far away from this planet. you must first go down deep into its depths"
Didn't expect to see what I love again so soon! Thanks for another video,, they're always super interesting :)
The fact that the water surface acts like a mirror outside the circle is mind blowing to me. I never played this game and I’ve also never scuba-dived or what not, so I wouldn’t know much about this, but that’s still fascinating to me.
The audio design of your videos is truly masterful. I always come back to this video just for the sound design of it, because I adore the soundscape of Subnautica and you do such a good job of replicating/adding to it.
1:20 this moment is so good.
You put in the little diorama of the mario kart doppler effect table in the house, I love these videos
subnautica just makes me geek out so much. its one of the few games where i get completely immersed and forget the outside world.
Man, this video is so good. It’s educational and I didn’t even realize it until half way through.
These videos are always so great! Script, Art, Editing, it's all just polished to perfection. Genuinely awe-inspiring.
This is probably one of my favorite videos I've seen recently, the production quality is (almost literally) out of this world. Your art style along with constant audio reinforcement really makes everything you say feel more powerful. I'd love to see more stuff like this.
Wait, did I just watch a science focused video by Scruffy? A surprise to be sure but a pleasant one.
now THIS is a game that uses sound as an absolute SCARE FACTOR. beyond scare. It's just complete and utter terror.
I loved the way you described refracting. You explained it in such a way that made it sound like a program trying to prevent itself from crashing.
mans single handedly making me feel excited to work in music and sound productions right now
so glad I picked this major
"I'll never use this equation in real life"
Video game programmers: Am I a joke to you?
The critical angle was so fricking hilarious!😂
NEW SCRUFFY VID DROPPED BABE WAKE UP
I never knew that a video on youtube will help me in school and isn't boring to me at the same time
Subnautica triggers so many feelings at once it's crazy! The sound effects in the game are so good they feel real, I always get chills hearing a reaper in the distance.
i swear videogames and TH-cam vids about how game engines work to make a nice looking picture to catch your eye thats barely noticeable has helped me more than a decade of school alone, and I'm not necessarily going to plan on using programming!
As a previous physicist student, this is great!
Brilliant!
you just explained this weird over-my-head mathematical/physics concept better than any teacher I've ever had
That music just made me unlock memories I’ve long forgotten
5:00 So when he says "if the water was perfectly still", the background audio fades out. The one that earlier he said was ambient ocean currents.
That's a great attention to detail!
You just explained refraction better than any science teacher I've had.
I feel like Scruffy would adore the soundscape of alien isolation. That game has such rich sound quality and composition.
I finally understood why light bends its path. Thank you, Scruffy.
The best thing about this video? Shortly afterward I was learning about light in Science class- and we had a whole unit on refraction in materials. I felt so smart knowing the things in this video!
that is super cool and I absolutely love this video. As a SCUBA diver, you always are aware of the visual phenomenon, but since it has no bearing on the sport in any fashion, it is never explained during your training.
When I say this game was one of the handful that remind me why I love video games I truly mean it. The developers put so much love into the sounds and looks in the game
Snuffy's character is like one of those guys from that Disney movie Soul. I love it.
This video has some amazing editing and transitions. Good job!
I loved this video! Is like your "What do microwaves hum?" video.
I'd like to see more "science" videos like these.
I’m so glad you covered this game. It’s literally perfect and probably my favorite game.
Okay... that little upward bend of the bass note at 2:50 as the arrow changes directions, ngl that gave me chills.
Thank you for the lesson on Snell's Window. Subnatica is the most terrifying game I have ever played. Kudos.
Game: *features a crashed space ship*
Scruffy: Ill take your entire stock
I legit said outloud “oh my gosh, this is beautiful” once seeing all the art in this video. Also couldn’t put aside that fact when watching your vid on fnaf too, this format is so outstanding to me.
I never comment on anything, it's just so awesome how much time and detail you put into these videos, but with such pleasing and easy to understand presentation. Spot on. I'll see you on Patreon.
How did I miss this video!? I love this game’s atmosphere and visuals.
As a year 11 physics student we did the Total internal reflection prac with a beaker of water and a laser.
As a computer programmer I can appreciate the thought and work put in to achieve this in code.
As a gamer I just loved the whole thing.
Well explained Scruffy.
This deserves a follow up on Subnautica's audio design alone!
This video made a pretty convincing pitch to have Scruffy voice the PDA if Unknown Worlds makes another Subnautica game
I like that you're expanding to more than just music and audio. This was suprisingly informative
wait how can you smell windows in sub-
**rereads title**
oh
Bro the vector analogy just explained surface plasmons to me, it's amazing
A video on Subnautica is such a good idea! I love that game.
Scruffy here is making an IMAX documentary
This isn't even a music/audio focused video, yet I had to put on my headphones midway through just to appreciate Scruffys sounddesign
I love Scruffys little character, they’re so charming looking!
This taught me refraction better than school did… Amazing work, as always
Was learning out the index of refraction last physics lesson, so it's really cool to see how this bit of physics is applied to videogames. Great video as always
I listen to subnautica way to much and you did such a good job at recreating the music. It was just different enough to tell it wasn’t the original but someone who didn’t know would have no idea.
Another reason this phenomenon was important to the game that you didn't mention is that a lot of the early game has you swimming up the surface to breathe. Snell's Window adds a lot to these moments, because it gives you some depth perception of how far you have to go and is a lot more interesting to look at than a flat water plane! Also the idea that Subnautica was tracing rays to simulate this effect instead of approximating it with some clever tricks is a bit misleading haha. Thanks for the video.
This taught me more about how light works in 9 minutes than the American school system did in several weeks. What that says about the system should be obvious, but either way I'm impressed! That's just a LOT of detail for a game to go through the effort for, and I'm glad I get how it works now :3
that reveal of the 3d world/ character was amazing
maybe i could learn more complex subjects if scruffy's teaching it
My favourite part of the game is the fact that you dont see leviathans all the time, it makes the experiences terrifing rather than tedios.
learnt more about critical angles, refraction, total internal refraction, index of refraction and the vector magnitudes of light in this video than i did in my physics class. great video!
Subnautica, science, and Scruffy; the three holy “S”’s
As someone who has studied the physics in this, you did a really great explanation of snells law! I loved the internal reflection part, I'd never seen it explained like that before!!
It's already cool enough that technology allows us to simulate real world earth science in a video game BUT it's just as crazy that someone could make such a sleek, well put together video that explains it so well! Always a joy to see your vids, Scruffy!
I’ve watched this video before but wanted to rewatch it due to being in advanced physics in which I’m learning stuff like, electricity, magnetism, em waves, optics, relativity, quantum, and nuclear physics. I’m currently on optics at the moment which focuses heavily on reflection and refraction(Snell’s Law). Just how light interacts with things. I was just interested in rewatching it again and seeing how much better I understand some things now. This video explained stuff it needed to really well and very accurate and it’s one of my favorite videos on TH-cam.
Amazing video! You never know when some obscure fact you learned about in school will suddenly be actually interesting to you.
in seeking to avoid maths revision i got tricked into doing physics instead..... amazing video hehe, keep up the incredible work!!
I've been playing subnautica since like Alpha or Beta (anyone else remember the terraformer?). Somehow, though, after all this time, I'm still finding new things to appreciate about it. Great video, Scruffy, you've earned yourself another follower.
That was one of the best and easiest to understand description of refraction I have seen. Love your work!
1:35
War Flashbacks of "The Hug Monster"
Amazing work on the visuals on this video Scruffy! No wonder you were so excited to post it!
This is some good TV channel level production
"even if it's partially obstructed by the silhouette of a highly dangerous creature"
*mittens, my cute pet swims past*
The best part is when it starts as a normal Scruffy vid, but then suddenly *zooms out* continually as it reveals, “Surprise! We’re in the game! Scruffy is in the game! Also, this video isn’t about sound effects, it’s about LIGHT PHYSICS!”
This game is such a beautiful one and it's extremely interesting just how much work was put in to sell the idea
seeing this video immediately got me so excited. subnautica is one of, if not my favorite game ever and your analysis videos are second to none.