You could also try a seaplane to get a closer look.

I did with a Twin Otter and you can really see the swells when you are floating in the water with 15 knots wind, but if you look at the floats from an exterior view, they get totally submerged at times and sometimes the water reaches the fuselage. Totally unrealistic as you could never take off under those conditions but you can still takeoff anyway.

 

With stronger winds, the effect is even worse and the floats totally disappear most of the time. Yet, after you take off, the water looked motionless to me and pretty bland altogether and this is with a high end PC, graphic card and high settings. Obviously, for some reason, people seem to have a different experience and/or opinion so if you like it, great and if you don't, wait for the next service pack and hope LM does something with the water effects

That's not the only problem with float planes:

 

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=4481

 

There is a thread regarding AI boat wakes on the P3d official forum:

 

http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=4356

 

Someone came up with an idea for fixing the AI boat wakes by editing sim.cfg (see a few posts down in that thread) and it's possible that it applies to seaplane floats also.

I did with a Twin Otter and you can really see the swells when you are floating in the water with 15 knots wind, but if you look at the floats from an exterior view, they get totally submerged at times and sometimes the water reaches the fuselage. Totally unrealistic as you could never take off under those conditions but you can still takeoff anyway.

 

Thanks. Now I appreciate the water in P3d2 much better. I still haven't seen any "whitecaps", but I did get the same result as you did using a Huey with floats.  Even though the ocean surface exhibited a good swell, the UH-1 VC viewpoint stayed level. The average condition looks fine (see the screen capture, with both mesh at 1 m and tessellation on ultra), but the aircraft alternatively floats well out of the water and then gets partially submerged. I know that in recent apps that have realistic water motion (like BF4 and COD Ghosts), the boats do bob up and down and ride the swells, so it is possible to do. Is it worth it for a flight sim? I'm not really sure. If training is the goal, I might say that the answer is yes. But in the grand scheme of things, boat wake effects and realistic float plane dynamics while on water seem like they would be a lower priority for improvement.

The float plane dynamics (and sound effects) in Flight Unlimited 2 and 3 were excellent, and that was perfected over fifteen years ago! There should be no problem doing it in 2013.

With all the comments about how bad the water is in Prepar3D - I decided to take a look myself, as its something ive not tried. The plane was being tossed around a lot so its best to view full screen.

 

Ive not gone searching for white caps and Im not entirely convinced that you will see them often in real life! A point open to debate I feel. Ive heard that their is still some work to be done on the water, and if thats the case, im uncertain what the enhancements are that are planned?

 

The water - flying in bad weather...

 

Personally, I think its amazing, but who am I to judge!

 

This is the swell.

With all the comments about how bad the water is in Prepar3D - I decided to take a look myself, as its something ive not tried. The plane was being tossed around a lot so its best to view full screen.

 

Ive not gone searching for white caps and Im not entirely convinced that you will see them often in real life! A point open to debate I feel. Ive heard that their is still some work to be done on the water, and if thats the case, im uncertain what the enhancements are that are planned?

 

The water - flying in bad weather...

http://youtu.be/aDN0ZfdvRmk

 

Personally, I think its amazing, but who am I to judge!

 

This is the swell.

http://youtu.be/Ua1vu1WwT04

 

On the bad weather video, the swells are very visible but they look fairly static to me except for the occasional jump. On my first flight, I thought they looked ok too but when I fixated on one particular swell, it did not seem to move, and then I could see that the other swells were not moving either except for an occasional abrupt jump which I can see in your video as well towards the end. Hard to explain but for me, it still looks like a painting and that looks very different than what the water looks like in FSX. 

 

And on the video showing the swells, it looks like the plane has stopped in mid air or is flying backwards based on what the swells motion looks like.  I don't get it. Was the simulator paused when you took the video and if yes, why is the water still moving? It seems like the simulation has paused but not the video card GPU. If the sim was not paused, then I really need to get my eyes checked

 

It may well be that my eyes are deceiving me, but it looks like you only get one or the other, plane motion or water motion. But as I said, I don't really trust my eyes on this one and if you think it looks great to you, then that is the only thing that really matters, doesn't it?

The Swells are important if Aircraft Carriers and Sea planes bobs around in the wake and swells

 

But for all other flying the white caps makes the ocean come alive

As you can see from the second video I was in slew mode. The plane was stationary to show the water movement and I was not in pause.

 

When your concentrating on flying you don't get time to enjoy the view. What was amazing in the bad weather video was that your trying to keep the plane in a straight line and you look out the front and catch a swell looming in front of you. You will also notice that the aircraft is very low. Your not going to see the water move so much when your flying higher. Certainly from 35000ft the water will appear static.

 

Its nice to see the white caps in FSX but looking back at it now, is the movement actually that real? Does the water move that fast?

 

When watching HUGE tankers from about 18000ft on the South China Sea, they appear to be standing still, you only notice they are moving because of the wake. The sea certainly cannot be seen to be moving.

 

I can only recount my own experiences and would be extremely interested to hear from a real life pilots point of view.

 

 

The water - flying in bad weather

I have not tried this yet, but will a bit later today.  This looks quite realistic and better yet, REX is coming out with REX4, which might add some very nice touches.  Also, LM have stated that they are continuing to work with the water, so this is all good news.

If you really want to comment on the water improvements or not, please get a freeware ship / boat / yacht and go out there on the water with wind speed set around 20 knots, and then see what you think!. As for white caps, once you have been at water level and see what LM have done already to the water, just pause and think about it!

 

Not so easy to get legacy 2D FS9 white cap textures and other textures to stick to these real, dynamic 3D waves, and move along with them. So easy to find fault until you realise whats really going on in this new sim. This sim is a totally different animal, so I think even comparing it to FSX as a "standard" is most unfair!

Its nice to see the white caps in FSX but looking back at it now, is the movement actually that real?

 

Yes it is real... The whitecaps are real...they appear and disappear when flying over oceans...

Does anyone here have the secret to getting at least half-descent looking water using REX textures in V2, and WITHOUT disabling tessellation/HDR?  I thought I had it by changing some settings in Inspector, or disabling all driver changes in Inspector, but alas they're gone again and it looks really poor!

Does anyone here have the secret to getting at least half-descent looking water using REX textures in V2, and WITHOUT disabling tessellation/HDR? I thought I had it by changing some settings in Inspector, or disabling all driver changes in Inspector, but alas they're gone again and it looks really poor!

Please could you post a picture of what you consider to be good and a pic from P3D that you consider poor? It would help greatly to understand what the issue is?

Yes it is real... The whitecaps are real...they appear and disappear when flying over oceans...

Thanks, I've never spotted them.

I bought V2 two days ago (& FSUIPC 4 and the Migrator tool)......I uninstalled it....it was a horrifying experience unless u don't fly online and love default fighter jets (lolll) I installed REX and FTX Global and I guess everything looked really good except the water...

 

WATER is HORRIFYING.....Im back on FSX  now almost only because of that reason.....Im keeping my license in tact along with the DL folder and waiting till this thing becomes popular and has some standards to it...along with the PMDG EULA tweek and Aerosoft 1.16.....

Please could you post a picture of what you consider to be good and a pic from P3D that you consider poor? It would help greatly to understand what the issue is?

HDR enabled:

 

What I fortunately just rediscovered is that if a change Negative Load Bias to 'Allowed' from 'Clamped', things do improve enough to make it at least tolerable, if not still pretty lame:

 

I have ALL Inspector settings set to Application Controlled, and that was one I forgot to lose, the Load Bias setting which I think is what I inadvertently discovered previously but didn't recognize which parameter was contributing to the improvement/deterioration.