Request To re enable some Hardcoded water parameters in the water shader

[Wolfman5750]

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This note is being driven by the recent removal of the cubemap intensity slider in CS. Overall, as a water mod author, I feel like a lot of knobs that I use to get my desired look are slowly being removed and hardcoded. If that's the intent, then I'll do the best I can with what's left to me, but I wanted to document each of the knobs that I've lost, and explain how I would use them if they were still accessible.

For some background info to my note. My mod makes adjustments to the Watertype records in skyrim. Each cell in skyrim has an assigned watertype, which defines how the water looks in that cell. Worldspaces have an assigned Watertype, that defines the water in the LOD. Some statics have meshes linked to a specific water type as well. The parameters in each watertype define how that water should look; color, fog, reflectivity, etc.

Here are some of the knobs in the vanilla watertype record that appear hardcoded in CS, what they do, and how I use them.

Reflectivity Amount (RA): Blend between the solid reflection color and the cubemap. Mods like Realistic Water 2 keep this at 1.0. That makes the cubemap as clear as possible. Mods like Pure Waters, Cathedral Waters, and SkyVRaan use lower values to have more control over the water color. Here's how I used it in SkyVRaan.

• At certain angles, the LOD tends to look overly bright. I can use RA in combination with the reflection color and weather multiplier to darken the water LOD a bit.
• The cubemap doesn't get the fog from the weather. Some weather mods have a sunset with blueish sky colors, then use a purple or red fog. So you'll see distant purple-red mountains, but in the reflection they'll be clear mountains with a blue sky behind them. I use a combination of a lower reflectivity amount, a gray reflection color, and a purple weather multiplier to ultimately blend a little purple into the cubemap. In a lot of situations, that helps the distant reflection match better with the scene. -A lower reflectivity amount also helps to hide some of the limitations of the SSR. In VR, the limitations of SSR are more "in your face" compared to SSE. Things like the halo around objects between the player and the water, or the above distant fog mismatch. By turning down the RA, you still have the right shapes and colors in the reflection, but it makes the SSR limitations less visible and jarring.

The last RA point was more or less covered by the cubemap intensity setting in CS, but that seems to be hardcoded now too. I was about to release a new version of SkyVRaan that was tuned around a cubemap intensity of 0.2-0.5 before the option was removed from the CS interface. I do note that it appears the current hardcoded intensity has been reduced.

Reflection Magnitude: This value determines how much the normals (from the noise wave pattern texture) will affect the distortion amounts of the reflections on the water surface. I'm not as clear as to whether or not this has been hardcoded. It's hard to tell if my changes were being taken, and this is one I didn't touch much.

There also was a slider for this that has now been removed. I tended to tweak this value up from the defaults.

Fresnel: I don't know how to properly describe this one, but it impacts the angle at which you start seeing the cubemap. You guys probably could describe it better than I could. -The default feels pretty good to me, but if really love to be able to turn it down just a little bit. I would not push the reflection back as far as I did in the old SkyVRaan. That was a different situation, and let me know if you want more detail.

In addition to the items above, the following parameters that I tweak are working. Please don't hardcode these! haha -Reflection, Deep, and Shallow water colors -Impact of the Weather Water Multiplier (from the weather records) -Refraction Magnitude -Water Fog Properties.