Here is a video of a little demo I put together a few years back. For this demo, I decided to take a popular and very fast method for simulating water in 2D and project it isometrically over a typical game land mass. I had to create a software Z-Buffer using the alpha channel of the 32bit frame buffer. This is so that the water waves interact with and don’t penetrate the voxels of the landscape as well as rendering properly. I also implemented rudimentary diffraction and shadows on the water waves. Everything here is software rendered using fixed point arithmetic. I really love this effect and I would love to apply this technique to any game I made using an isometric terrain.

Watch it in motion here: