Using Wave Physics to Render Water

I was going through a list of games that I've programmed recently and was reminded about Dynamite Fishing, a game we (at Electrotank) created for Comedy Central. For that game I programmed a series of wave physics classes that shows waves moving through water at a side view.

I had fun creating that and thought that I'd rewrite it a little more cleanly for ActionScript 3 and make the source available. It allows you to inject waves at any x position with any amplitude. Waves obey superposition - that means that you can continually inject waves and they'll add/subtract each other to produce the appropriate result.

In the source provided you can specify any DisplayObject to show up and float in the water.

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In the example below you can just click anywhere to inject a wave. Notice too that the water never quite settles down. That's because I set it up to inject a small disturbance at random intervals.

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