I've tried making reflective water and I can either get it to be totally reflective but totally opaque or I can get it cube mapped (which only reflects the sky) and semitransparent.

I want the total reflection and the semitransparentness. Obviously I used the "set reflection shading on" for the reflection then tried ghosting it; it didn't work, then tried lowering the alpha; it didn't work either.

What can I do? How can I achieve reflection and semitransparency (stuff refraction at the moment (unless you got an easy way to do that as well) I'm just bothered about making it look recognisabley like water.

(I saw one of the pictures posted on the homepage and it reminded me of the project I'd started which included this either entirely reflective and opaque water or this partially reflective (cube mapped) and translucent water.)

Cowbox
Soharix HQ
http://www.soharix.homestead.com/

look at EVOLVED water shaders

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=79849&b=8&p=4

Thats all fine and dandy, and the shaders are cool, I'm just having difficulty implementing them with sparky's collision DLL. I can get one or the other working and don't know how to get them both working.

Can anyone help?

(When I try to use them both in the same bit of code it says "Object (1) not setup" and object 1 was and always has been, set up.)

Cowbox
Soharix HQ
http://www.soharix.homestead.com/

Can we have some source to look at?

i'm guessing that you mean that its WAY too reflective, like a mirror
this can easily be overcome by placing an alpha mapped blue plain object over it

which will make it seem less shiney
you will have to play about with the alpha values

@ ThinkDigital I can't really offer you any code, because I can't A. Garantee it will work or B. Seperate out the right part.

@ Pricey And I've tried all that, putting plains and stuff over the object with alpha mapping, it just doesn't seem to work properly.

And to be honest, I'd rather get the water shader working properly because it will look a heck of a lot better in the end, with less work on my part. - I just can't because it doesn't like sparky's collision DLL.

Cowbox
Soharix HQ
http://www.soharix.homestead.com/

Do you want genuine reflection (i.e. you see correct reflections of moving objects if you look into the water) - or would you be happy to see reflections of the surrounding skybox? The latter is probably very cheap to do and, at a quick glance, you should get the effect of looking at water.

Lol, I guess I should close this now.

I finally realised it was just something to do with the shader I was using (I downloaded from EVOLUTION, 2 water shaders) I tried using the less advanced one first and it didn't work. This put me off using the other one but then today, I did, and it works fine. So yeh, my water in my game is good now, and there is no point in this thread anymore.

(Here's an image of my resultant water shading:
)

Cowbox
Soharix HQ
http://www.soharix.homestead.com/

P.S. Thanks for everyones help anyway.

glad to hear you got it working!

the game is looking good

it works fine

I didn't see a FPS (frames per second) stat on your screen shot.

I'd recommend having one on during development so you can see what is affecting your speed.

The last time i used that complicated reflective water shader it killed my FPS. I think the problem is that not all it's calculations are being carried out in the hardware.



It's the nicest water shader I've ever seen but 11 fps!

I've never had to bother about FPS on testing mainly because, my games generally aren't very graphically needy, I know what is going to slow a computer down so I don't need to bother. When I need to know a variable I print it when I need it. (I know what your all expecting, I've seen the screenshots of WIPs with like 20 odd variables down the side. I like to just go by eye.)

Yes you have a point and reason to advise me otherwise, but this is the way I make games. (Maybe I will look for the FPS when I start making games with hefty graphics.)

Cowbox
Soharix HQ
http://www.soharix.homestead.com/