DarkPlaces and transparent water

[BoraxMan]

This isn't so much an issue, than a question.

For transparent water to work, the map needs to be vis'ed with transparent water, otherwise, you won't see anything through the water.

I loaded an old map of mine in tyr-quake, and I couldn't see anything through the water, except a hall of mirrors effect, which is what I expect! Maps vis'ed for transparent water showed whats in the water, those didn't, didn't show.

However, in DarkPlaces, it renders transparent water correctly, regardless of whether the map was compiled with transparent water support or not.

r_vis is set to 0, so why is it doing this? Does Dark Places ignore vis information? It doens't seem to, as r_vis 1 drops the frame rate.

Does it have some kind of magic, where it can 'on the fly', recompile the map for transparent water support?

Any enlightenment on this would be appreciated.

[Seven]

Hello BoraxMan,

I can ensure you, that Darkplaces does not use magic.

It sounds to me that you maybe mix up 2 things (but my bad english can fool me):
All advanced engines that I know have a feature to make water transparent. I do not know tyr-quake.
Making water transparent has nothing to do with vis-ed maps.

Vis-ed maps mean:
You can see entities inside the water when looking into it from outside.
Example:
There is a lightning gun inside the water.
You will only see that gun when you vis-ed the map.
You will not see it when it is not vis-ed.
But you will always see the texture inside the waters ground (doesnt matter if vis-ed or not) if your engine supports transparent water. You can look "through" the water texture with that engines feature, but you can only see entities in the water when the map is vis-ed.

Please try other engines than DP to see the similar effect.

[Spike]

DP does have an alternate rendering mode where it follows portals instead of using the vis. no idea what the cvar for that is called.

Additionally, with special water effects (pretty water), refraction and reflection start at the water plane rather than the view, and thus does automagic watervis (rather than anything special with portals and stuff). This is also true in FTE.

None of the above will affect the entities a server will report to the client, thus even if you can see underwater, you won't see any entities under there. However, you can see explosions and other similar effects as those ignore the pvs in NQ.

Its also possible that the map you're using was already watervised, which is the only sane way to enable viewing of entities on the other side of water surfaces.