how do i add an Y offset to the water pallete

[Hyp0the]

basically im new to godot. i want to make an accurate recreation of s3 for my project. i tried looking stuff up on the internet, but the water pallete either just dissapears entirely or floods the entire screen no matter the Y position. can any1 help me w this? huge thanks in advance

[DimensionWarped]

Shaders are far from my strong suite, but I'll explain it to the best of my ability. Someone like @Renhoex can maybe pipe in on whether or not my explanation is at all accurate.

HUD.tscn contains a WaterOverlay ColorRect. This is what actually is responsible for coloring everything below the water. It employs our PaletteSwap shader and is configured to transform colors based on the closest match it can find in OriginalPalette (which looks like this:

And for each pixel it will basically find the closest matching color by iterating through all of the colors in that pallete texture and taking the one that has the best match score (which is basically just the color with lowest combined difference between all three color channels from the pixel that would have been rendered if the ColorRect weren't there). From there it takes the pixel from that mapped and replaces it with the pixel in the same place from the SwapPalette texture (and our default swap palette texture is WetPal.png below.

This functionality should work out of the box without you needing to do anything. It might not have the best color granularity though, particularly if you are using more colorful sprites than what we provide.

Another exception worth noting is that the WaterOverlay is only 320x224 pixels by default, so if you enlarge the playing resolution of the game, you'll run into another issue where the colorrect doesn't cover with width of the playfield (and maybe not the height either if you expand the veritcal resolution too).

But as for what would cause the whole screen to disappear, I have no idea. That sounds goofy. Can you provide a video and a list of what you've done that might have impacted rendering of water? I assume this isn't just out of the box stuff, because I don't think think we've had issues with our palette shaders on any given platform. Speaking of platform, that'd also be helpful. If I hear you are playing on some old phone that has no shader support I might just tell you to pound sand.

[Hyp0the]

no, but basically, what i mean is, i want to replicate the OG issue with sonic 3, where the water changes pallete eight pixels under the actual water box. (screenshot below.)

what i tried to do and it didnt work was to add uniform y offset and use the 'vertex y += y offset' (lines of code i tried to add to the shader included below)

shader_type canvas_item;

uniform float Y_offset = 0.0; 

void vertex() {

    VERTEX.y += Y_offset;
}

after what i'd done, changing the Y offset to a higher value than 0 made the water pallete never show up, while setting it to a negative number forced water pallete everywhere. (screenshots provided below, with positive and negative Y offset values accordingly)

and the initial question was asked with a purpose of getting the water to work like it does in original sonic 3 game, cause im trying to replicate s3 for my project with highest accuracy possible.
in short, on the original game it works thanks to the screen division thing, similar to the one competition mode uses, but with a few changes. basically sort of like a viewport i guess. same way for the water distortion afair.
and while i dont know if its possible to do it the same way in godot (im more than sure it is), i know that there should be a way to make water pallete apply 8 pixels offset on Y axis than the actual water layer starts. which is what i meant to learn when asking. im sorry if my initial question sounded just dumb its just that i spent 3 days trying to figure that out and im hopeless at this point

[DimensionWarped]

I think all you'd need to accomplish that in particular is to move the ColorRect from before that I was talking about down by 8 pixels and add another color rect above it with the same palette shader which is smaller (only 8 pixels tall) that renders below the player.

For what it's worth, I'm only seeing an offset of like 2 pixels in S3... at least in Carnival Night. There's an interesting thing going on in S3 where you can spend a frame or two with part of yourself underwater without the palette effect being applied and that ends up being closer to the 8 pixels you mentioned, but I think that's a bug. I guess

EDIT: I just spent a few minutes analyzing what you are describing in Angel Island Zone and I don't think what you are trying to replicate is worth trying to replicate. It's clearly a programming mistake or a technical issue and not actually intentional. Sometimes random tiles in Sonic's sprite just don't get recolored when they are underwater when it's right at the edge like that... it's goofy.

Here's an example:

This is a mess. It isn't intentional. First, the effect is working differently on the bottom most tiles compared to the tiles the next set up. There the dark blue hasn't started to be replaced yet but the main blue has. This clearly isn't a deliberate effect, it's a side effect of them doing scanline interrupt effects. They tolerated it because it happens quickly enough that no one is going to notice in motion and one frame later...

it normalizes. Still has one slightly goofy tile for some reason on the left side (probably another side effect), but the only oddity here is that there are some pixels above the water line where Sonic is being recolored (and no, we can't replicate that effect with our current approach to shading things).

If this kind of accuracy is something you care about, it's way outside the wheelhouse of anyone working on this project. You need someone who works on Genesis emulators.

[Hyp0the]

alright, thank you for the input

[Caverns4]

On thing I'll say early is, if I remember, Ice Cap has a water ripple effects similar to Labyrinth zone. If I'm wrong, disregard this part:
In Sonic 2 Retold, you can use my Waterpalette.gdshader file. That's the the World Next water shader with a ripple effect. Its not identical, but its close enough for most.

However, onto the bigger point, it looks like the effect you're talking about is the background layer being affected before sprites. Sadly, that isn't really possibly as is, because the Worlds Next water shader just takes color in -> color out, it doesn't know what's what. The closest you can get is, in hud.gd, find where the WaterOverlay is updated, and changed the reference to WaterLevel to WaterLevel+8

[NeonSRB2]

One way or another, youre going to be adding some entirely different functionality to the engine. You will be changing scripts or shader code, and exactly what way you want to do this is up to you as a programmer. If the problem is shader code, you can read these shaders, or read the godot docs to have full-on tutorials. Remember that "fuck around and find out" works here too. If you really get stuck, you can try to avoid it altogether with using two rects for each seperate water palette.

…

On Sun, Feb 8, 2026, 6:01 AM Hyp0the ***@***.***> wrote: no, but basically, what i mean is, i want to replicate the OG issue with sonic 3, where the water changes pallete eight pixels under the actual water box. (screenshot below.) image.png (view on web) <https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f79c4486-c876-4f3d-8f2b-4b4c114f4f8f> what i tried to do and it didnt work was to add uniform y offset and use the 'vertex y += y offset' (lines of code i tried to add to the shader included below) shader_type canvas_item; uniform float Y_offset = 0.0; void vertex() { VERTEX.y += Y_offset; } after what i'd done, changing the Y offset to a higher value than 0 made the water pallete never show up, while setting it to a negative number forced water pallete everywhere. (screenshots provided below, with positive and negative Y offset values accordingly) image.png (view on web) <https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9866225c-cf2d-40bd-a489-e924c6682a84> image.png (view on web) <https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/980c9060-8f86-4969-ae85-a4541b89087b> and the initial question was asked with a purpose of getting the water to work like it does in original sonic 3 game, cause im trying to replicate s3 for my project with highest accuracy possible. in short, on the original game it works thanks to the screen division thing, similar to the one competition mode uses, but with a few changes. basically sort of like a viewport i guess. same way for the water distortion afair. and while i dont know if its possible to do it the same way in godot (im more than sure it is), i know that there should be a way to make water pallete apply 8 pixels offset on Y axis than the actual water layer starts. which is what i meant to learn when asking. im sorry if my initial question sounded just dumb its just that i spent 3 days trying to figure that out and im hopeless at this point — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#342 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/A4JOMPIPG4NMJAESEQL5PXL4K4JQPAVCNFSM6AAAAACUL5DT52VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTKNZTGMZDENI> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: <Techokami/SonicWorldsNext/repo-discussions/342/comments/15733225@ github.com>

[Hyp0the]

i cant lie i genuinely didnt think of this, but apparently according to dimensions' reply its just going to be goofy and basically not really that much worth it, due to even BUGGIER nature of the bug in og. thank you for the input, though