Very good points, Spaz. I found a technical dissertation below that talks about wake components, and just how speed of ship and water conditions and type can affect the ship's wake.
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jul2001/994688283.Ph.r.htmlYour photograph highlights well what seems to be the two main visual effects that need to be taken into consideration in order to produce a good wake effect in FSX:
One is the wake which forms from the bow wave which, after reading the attached link, I understand to be called the "Kelvin" wake; and the other is the turbulent wake that is formed from the propeller wash and eddies at the stern of the ship.
I was amazed, when I started reading about this stuff, at just how many other components there are to a ship's wake! So I took a serious look at how FSX tries to represent wake effects by going through the Effects folder and also studying the attachpoints in the boat models, and I noticed that the developers have picked up on exactly the same two main visual wake features as observed above.
In most of the FSX ships, the developers have combined the Kelvin wake and turbulent wake into a single effect (and defined it in the boat's sim.cfg file), BUT noticeably in the warships (i.e. the carrier, cruiser, destroyer and CG cutter) they have split them into separate "bow wake" and "main wake" effects (and hard coded them into the MDL files).
So, if we can ask Randy to check back in with those FSX wake effect sources he's seen, we may be able to find some good ones that really capture the essence of a good realistic looking wake, and get them onto our models!
