Hi!When I fly over the water in FS2004 with water detail set to "high", I've noticed that the reflections seem to "rotate" in a strange manner.Is there a way to have the water so that the textures aren't shuffled, so that the waves on the water appear static?Thanks for your reply in advance!James

I second James on this matter. Can it be that nobody else notices what James calls "rotation" of the reflections that look like your water effects slider was passing from low to high on regular two second intervals? Anyone??Mauricio

That's the bumpmap animation effect...It is supposed to appear to be waves moving. I don't think you can turn it off unless you move your Water Effects slider away from high to turn of bumpmapping

I think the problem is that there is no animation involved. The waves are controlled by a b/w texture, which in a way "rotates" it's contrast - so after half the rotation time, the texture is "gray" and so the reflection is flat and not distorted.I don't think there's anything the community could do - there either have to be 2 bump textures, or an animated one. I doubt one could stop the rotation at all. But maybe it's possible...

Terrible news! A really sad day for flight simulator addons... I mean, one second you have one of the prettiest eye candy we have yet seen as far as water textures are concerned, and the next it becomes a bunch of white blobs on a blurry surface. You would think there is some way to turn this friggin animation (bump mapping or whatever) off. I really hope someone comes up with a solution.Thanks for the insight guys.Mauricio

Same here!The textures are very nice indeed, but that swirling white star effect ruins it for me. Hopefully someone FS9 savy can come up with something............

I think if you add a wave-like pattern in the reflection texture and make the waves small enough, it might look quite good even when you're sitting on the water...maybe I'll look into that - but I'm sure people like Chris Willis and Bill Lyons will figure something out ;). Maybe I'll look into it a little more and release something.

Go for it Daniel! Were counting on you buddy. You got the lead. Don't let Lyons and Willis ruin it for you! :)

>Same here!>>The textures are very nice indeed, but that swirling white>star effect ruins it for me. Hopefully someone FS9 savy can>come up with something............I am with you all on this one. It looks great one second but when it rotates that reflection it looks like a blob of jello glowing. I have heard there are updates in the works r maybe the one that is out now IS the update. I installed it, then uninstalled it. Fighting with myself to decide if I want to reinstall it tonight.I think overall it just needs to be toned down a little bit.

>> I think overall it just needs to be toned down a little bit.I agree with you there.If the waves were made even smaller, and there was no rotation, just bumpy water with wonderful reflection, I believe it would look fantastic! The main problem most people are having with the water in FS2004 is that it looks bumpy one second then smooth the next, and that takes away too much from the visual realism.If there's anybody out there who believes you can cure this we'd love to hear from you!James

Yeah, what the heck is it that they don't get rid of the rotating stars? The water, waves and reflections are really quite good. The sparkle generator, or whatever it was put in there for, is a strange show stopper for many. Why Lyons doesn't kill it is beyond me. I posted on their site and no one responded. Weird. I'm sure someone will come up with something that works. Maybe the rumored patch perhaps.Noel

Noel, it's not easy to make a texture that looks as good from farther away but also natural when your sitting on the water. THere's two types of textures that define the water - the bump texture, that controlls the waves, and the reflection map.Bill Lyons managed to create such great reflections by using white spots in his reflection texture - without them, there wouldn't be such reflections. The downside of course are the sparkles when your flying low. But there has to be some kind of comprimise to be made...unless somebody figueres out how to modify the way the bump map "works".

I appreciate your explanation, however it doesn't appear that way intuitively. The white patches seem to only relate to the sparkle effect, whereas the overall reflective surface, which changes with the contour of the wave action, seems to be completely independent of the sparkle effect. They really do appear completely unrelated. How do you understand your explanation to be correct?Noel

Hey all,I've been following this thread for the last few days, hoping and praying thatsome solution might come out of this like so many other threads! I installed Bill Lyons environment files and discovered that while they look really awesome and real for a few seconds, they then turn into blobs of light (as if the bump map disappears) and then go back to looking like reflection on small waves. It appears as if it's not Bill's files, but rather the bump map that oscillates back and forth. I showed it to my roommate and he suggested a few things that may help. First of all, the oscillation looks a lot like the results of following a sin wave curve. So, on the topic of waves, I have a theory as to how the moving water effect works. It uses sin/cos waves (like waves in the ocean) to create the bumps. I'm not sure if I can describe it well, but it reminds me of the high school physics concept of constructive/deconstructive interference. Here is a website that describes it well: http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/courses/m309-...terference.htmlWhat I think is happening is described in the second photo at the bottom left, when you see the waves in FS9, the waves are in phase and then they all shift simultaneously to be out of phase, creating a flat line as the surface. In real life, because the waves in the ocean are so random, though you get in and out of phase in specific locations, you never get it throughout the entire ocean at once like in FS9. Now, whether this is something that can be fixed (ie turned off as suggested above) or if it's just a limitation of FS, I don't know. The SDKs may offer some help, but I sure hope it can be fixed as Bill's textures do not look very good if they keep shifting between awesome and pure suck. I hope this helps someone out in try to solve this all.-Cal

Noel, I don't know if I can explain it much better, but here I go:The oceanheightfield.bmp is a grayscale image that defines the wave pattern, while the env_*.bmp's contain the reflections. (The oceanheightfield file "rotates" it's contrast, as I said before, so in the middle of rotation there are no differences in wave height and the reflection is flat.)Now, when you are flying high, you see the water from far away, and the env_-texture is "spread out", so to speak, over a large area of water. Thus, there are many waves which, in a way, reflect a small area EACH. So, when there is a white spot in the env_map, it is spread across the wave and looks like a nice, realistic reflection.On the other hand, when you are flying low, the waves get much bigger, thus, a much larger area of the env_-map is reflected by each wave - so the sparkles aren't spread across the wave anymore, and the whole thing starts to look stupid.I hope that makes it clear.Cal: read what I've written to Noel ;)