Improving Water Appearance in XP11

[alexcolka 183]

3 hours ago, france89 said:

Out of curiosity, which packages are you guys using for the water?

Hi Francesco,

I'm using the following one:

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/39469-another-water-fix-for-xp11/

I find this script the better one because the waves are really well balanced with more natural look and feel and it comes with reflections in the script that you can edit to your taste easily, I tried many scripts and this one is the best for me.

[irrics 1,517]

4 hours ago, alexcolka said:

Hi Francesco,

 

I'm using the following one:

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/39469-another-water-fix-for-xp11/

I find this script the better one because the waves are really well balanced with more natural look and feel and it comes with reflections in the script that you can edit to your taste easily, I tried many scripts and this one is the best for me.

 

I don't understand why Laminar doesn't use basically any of these mods themselves.

Just about every one I see looks better than the default water.

[Murmur 3,941]

3 hours ago, irrics said:

I don't understand why Laminar doesn't use basically any of these mods themselves.

Just about every one I see looks better than the default water.

I think they may have issues for some wave height settings. For example, the water looks too calm even with high waves (even if still looking better than default, visually).

This will be especially important when LR implements 3D waves. If you try to activate 3D waves using the relevant dataref, you'll probably see weird results when using any of these mods.

in any case, seems LR will work on water visuals for the next release or so, let's see!

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

One more issue with water is how it affects float planes and boat-hull amphibian planes. We've been talking about how it looks, but there are categories of aircraft that are actually supposed to land on water!

Ideally, there should be a 1:1 correspondence between whatever the sim is showing for winds and wave height, to the actual performance of these planes when taking off and landing on water. Float planes should need fairly calm but not dead-flat water to break surface tension. Boat-hull amphibians, especially large ones like PBY Catalinas, should be able to handle rougher water. 

X-Plane has never gotten this right, and it was seriously borked after v11 launched. I haven't tried a water landing lately so I don't know if it's been fixed for basic calm water landings.

One of these days, I hope there is enough realistic water modeling to show the difference between a small Cessna with floats compared to something big with a boat hull, like a Grumman Albatross. It would be nice to practice water ditching in non-float/amphibious planes too, in a way that was realistic.

Wasn't there a post a while back that said Austin was trying to book time in a real floatplane to work this out? What ever became of that?

[Murmur 3,941]

Well, LR recently expanded their staff adding coders for the rendering engine, maybe they could add engineers for coding physics/flight models? (insert devilish emoticon here).

[Colonel X 1,430]

Better water is only a matter of time. For the time being, I disabled both reflections and FFT water to gain some performance back, comes in handy in VR.

[Emerson67 248]

On 1/11/2018 at 9:48 AM, Murmur said:

Well, LR recently expanded their staff adding coders for the rendering engine, maybe they could add engineers for coding physics/flight models? (insert devilish emoticon here).

I`m going to ask Austin to hire coders from North Korea. ONLY THEN we'll see fast progress.