Totally agree that there's room to look more water-y (depending on your application's needs).
One thing that can be done is playing around with the numbers / uniforms in the fragment shader to change the look. For many use cases you can get pretty far with that without actually changing the implementation in this demo.
If a more physically based level of realism is needed (like the water ripples on click in the demo that you linked) you can use techniques like height simulation based on a wave equation [1].
You'll of course need to balance realism with realtime feasibility - but often times getting a much better look comes down to tweaking some numbers until things look good!
Because it's not solving for the water surface elevation and velocity, only for light reflection and refraction from a pre-set surface.
> The way that the water appear to move comes from slightly altering the point on the refraction and reflection textures that we sample from every frame.
>
> These slight offsets comes from sampling a du/dv map, which is just a texture that encodes different x and y offsets.
The app in the link you posted does indeed look like it's solving at least a shallow water system of equations, and looks very excited to me as a wave physicist.
I study the role of waves in the larger meteorological and oceanographic context, specifically (1) how they govern momentum and energy exchange between wind and ocean currents, and (2) how they contribute to Lagrangian surface transport of pollutants, think oil spills or microplastics.
One thing that can be done is playing around with the numbers / uniforms in the fragment shader to change the look. For many use cases you can get pretty far with that without actually changing the implementation in this demo.
If a more physically based level of realism is needed (like the water ripples on click in the demo that you linked) you can use techniques like height simulation based on a wave equation [1].
You'll of course need to balance realism with realtime feasibility - but often times getting a much better look comes down to tweaking some numbers until things look good!
[1] - https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/GPUGems/gpugems_ch01.ht...