by Spike » Sun Jun 17, 2012 5:02 am
near clip planes mean you can 'reliably' see both sides of the water line despite being one specific side. The proper solution really is to do some sort of fat pvs with radius equal to the near clip plane.
sadly you'll have the same with certain tracelines/chasecam mods at certain angles/corners, and those involve empty/wall areas.
Many games will clip the viewport to be at least a specific distance from the water plane. This would also be a valid fix. might even work for chasecams too, if you can find a valid empty spot... Either way you're finding all surfaces or leafs or something within a sphere surrounding the viewpoint.
watervis is an alternative, but can potentially be quite expensive in overdraw (on older cards, anyway). it does allow transparent water surfaces too though, so you'd probably want this anyway.
the q2-esque hack where it looks above/below the viewpoint for additional nodes depending on the current water type generally works for regular water, but can fail for the underside/vertical sides of water. in the case of the underside of water, you've a worst-case bug on one frame or so before the player drops right through. in the case of vertical walls of water, generally such water is used only for waterfall type stuff, and always looks wrong anyway. either way, its generally thin (to hide weirdness at the sides) and stuck to another wall so you can't get within the middle of it anyway, so can never see the issue. Also, I don't recall any such vertical water brushes in vanilla content. Just the weird pool on start.bsp
thus the q2-esque hack works just fine for any situations that I can think of.
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