Expected Behavior
I expect the water to stay transparent even at lower quality settings, so that players can see what is inside the water.
Actual Behavior
The water turns completely opaque. It should obey the transparency setting.
Workaround
I don’t have a workaround - the best I could do is completely remove the water from the world and replace it with a meshpart if I detect quality level 7 or lower, which feels pretty dumb.
I mean I kind of understand why - current water is always drawn opaque and you’re feeding in another texture to make it seem transparent.
But I’d settle for it looking terrible on low end devices so long as they can see what is down there.
Maybe just give us another force-field like material for water surfaces instead so we can just use mesh parts?
This is a shame because simply removing the refraction would help client rendering, but removing the transparency completely like it is now isn’t much of a benefit for those who wan’t it transparent.
Also, my take on making water was to have layered BoxHandleAdornments, which creates a cool topigraphical effect.
Could this be due to your game being laggy for some reason and that is why the graphics rendering (level) is suffering?
I’m not too sure about mobile users graphics values compared to other games, but how’s the performance of your game?
Oh, performance is fine! But thankyou for asking. This is just when you have quality below 8, transparent water becomes opaque, regardless of how well the game is running. Means you can’t see the fishies
Yes, I understand that. The issue is that it affects gameplay. At a product level, you can’t design a game which includes being able to see through water.
You can’t have a diving game where you can see where your divers are by looking over the side of the boat, you can’t have a game where you collect shells in rockpools (my actual use case lol).
This is why its a bug report, and I think should stay open.
This holds true for a multitude of other rendering features which we scale based on performance. For example, one could design a game mechanic around lighting or shadows.
This is why its a bug report, and I think should stay open.
I understand your point of view. I’ll start a discussion to see if we want to revisit this design decision. That said, it’s still a conscious decision so keeping this thread open is not likely to spur any kind of actionable resolution.
Water transparency greatly enhances immersion, depending on the game. For example, classic Tomb Raider wouldn’t be the same if you couldn’t see beneath the water surface, both for gameplay and visual immersion. Here’s an idea: add an option to make the water completely invisible (for all graphics settings). This way, developers can customize the water surface by placing a thin, no-collision block or mesh where the water surface would be. They can then texture, animate, and adjust the transparency to their liking.
