Most of y’all probably don’t know this, but I love swimming. I’m more comfortable swimming than walking. I own two monofins. And I love underwater sections in games that look nice.

Except ARK. ARK does this stupid thing where even if you wear a SCUBA mask, there’s a lot of distortion. I can forgive the wonky overlay (a mask actually only restricts your peripheral vision, it doesn’t cause this much of a tunnel effect) but the wiggly “water effect” drives me crazy. Not only does it make it very unpleasant to be underwater - which is a shame because ARK has some really pretty underwater areas - it’s also extremely unrealistic! The main purpose of wearing a mask is to make it easier to see. The pocket of air allows your eyeballs to focus, which removes all distortion. ALL OF IT. If you’ve seen footage from an underwater camera on the Discovery channel, you know what it’s like to use a dive mask. There is NO “wigglyness” at all. The only distortion is to the color of light, and the distance you can see is affected by what’s in the water (dirt for instance. In ARK you can see tiny creatures and plant bits which is cool). There’s no refraction at all.



Above you can see what it looks like with ARK’s default SCUBA mask. Awful. Below that is a mod that’s supposed to give “clear vision”. It just removes the color filter, the wiggle is still there and actually may be slightly worse! There used to be a mod called ScubaVision which properly removed the wiggle factor, but it’s gone now. I have yet to see a mod that removes the wiggle but leaves the color filter alone.

/rant

