OBGE Liquid Water vs. Realistic Water

[joemodda]

For those who have tried these mods out, which one do you think is better? I've look at the screenshots and both spectacularly overhaul the vanilla water textures. However, I'm torn apart on which mod to download, as both are clearly incompatible with each other.

 

May I hear your opinions? Or should I just flip a coin?

 

:thumbsup:

[omeletted]

Can't really compare the two, they're totally different beasts. Liquid Water is a totally new system for rendering water, it's the best OBGE water there is. Pretty screenshot, it's quite customizable too. Caveat is there're a few bugs that will be fixed soon, like the water height bug where the water is rendered at an incorrect height. It's also a little complicated to setup, worth the effort though. Realistic Water on the other hand simply tweaks the appearance of the default oblivion water, just like all the other water mods thus far, eg. Enhanced Water. The latest version looks pretty good.

 

You'll have to decide on the pros and cons of each, then choose which to use. Personally, I'm waiting for the next version of Liquid Water which will fix most of the remaining bugs before installing.

[Luminiari]

Personally, I use Liquid Water. I just think it looks nicer, and I rather like the way it allows you to load other OBGE2 shaders (as opposed to the support plugin and the shaderlist document). On top of that, it's quite customisable. For instance, I have a nice sapphire-blue lake in Cheydinhal, a more turqoise hue for the water around the Imperial City, and murky greeny-brown water in Bravil.

[okappa]

I've never used Realistic Water -- it doesn't seem to work right on my system, I end up with something that's not Vanilla but that looks nothing like the screenshots.

 

OBGE's water looks incredible. It draws its color from the environment in the beautiful way that real water does, and allows you to add tints of blue or green wherever you want to make it look even better. However, probably because it uses some technology beyond what Vanilla provides, it SEVERELY increases the time it takes to load and start Oblivion. Plus, after loading a new game, the water takes a few more seconds to appear. You'll also need to download the latest version of DirectX, if you don't already have it. My biggest problem with it is that it doesn't change in response to the weather like Realistic's does (Realistic even does this in my game, despite being otherwise broken.)

[h4xkthx]

Liquid Water - Looks amazing, but prevents me from using Antialiasing

Realistic Water - Doesn't look as good, but allows the use of antialiasing

 

Would you like your game to look better 1% of the time or 99% of the time? Unless you roleplay a fisherman, of course.

[SilvasRuin]

Liquid Water. Especially if you can find some great settings for it. It also allows you to set up different regions and environments with different water settings, which few other mods have done let along put control of that into player hands.

[Luminiari]

Liquid Water - Looks amazing, but prevents me from using Antialiasing

Realistic Water - Doesn't look as good, but allows the use of antialiasing

 

Would you like your game to look better 1% of the time or 99% of the time? Unless you roleplay a fisherman, of course.

 

You can run AA using the AA shader that comes with OBGE V2. You just need to enable it in the shader.ini that comes with Liquid Water. Works for me!

[okappa]

Basically, Liquid Water is the prettiest, and Realistic is the most technically sound at the moment. So choose whichever's more important to you.

 

Personally, the breathtaking views Liquid provides are worth slightly longer loadtimes and a few glitches here and there to me, but everyone has different preferences.

[Soolie]

Realistic water is also dynamic. Which means the water will change depending on the weather and time of day. So on a perfectly still cloudless night with no wind, the water will be still with almost no waves and you will be able to see very deep into the water.

On the other hand if theres really strong winds you can expect very choppy water.

Also realistic water has different types of water for different locations such as Tamriel(default), cave, shivering isles, oblivion(lava), aylied ruin, sewer, fort and bravil.

[tomerk]

Also realistic water has different types of water for different locations such as Tamriel(default), cave, shivering isles, oblivion(lava), aylied ruin, sewer, fort and bravil.

 

This is something Liquid Water also supports, so there's no point in mentioning it :tongue:

 

And as to which you should use, there are pros and cons to both, like okappa said:

 

Liquid Water is made up of more physically based algorithms than any other water mod, whether or not you prefer that visually.

Ergo it supports things such as

 

It is also more customizeable than any other water mod: It allows the user to make custom water settings for every single interior cell or worldspace.

 

It does however suffer from a decent share of bugs that may be immersion breaking for you, most noticeably the water height issues.

Those are however all being worked on, along with the slow loadup times, and you can follow the progress on the official bethesda forum thread.

 

 

Realistic Water is a good tweak of the default water, but it remains a tweak. What it can do is limited by what the default water can do, which is frankly not much.

So, it is limited to things such as hard shoreline transitions, no refractions, opacity that remains constant regardless of the distance viewed through water, etc.

 

It has somewhat extended its dynamicity by using obse functions, but those can occasionally cause some visual glitches (not as bad as OBGE Liquid Water's glitches when they occur though).

 

 

Overall:

If you want water that people have ended up staring at for hours and that has created a decently size fan-base over at the bethesda forums, and you don't mind having some potentially immersion breaking bugs, try out liquid water.

 

If you want a more technically sound game in terms of how many bugs you have involving water, and don't mind sacrificing water visuals, get Realistic Water.

Also, the water height bug in Liquid Water has been known to be immersion breaking.

 

If the only reason you don't get Liquid Water is because of the bugs however, I do recommend you follow the progress on the bethesda forum thread.

 

Note: I won't post a video to compare of Realistic Water as the only videos of it I've seen are all from v 1.0, and it wouldn't be fair to compare the most recent released updates to OBGE Liquid Water to the initial release of Realistic Water.

Edited May 3, 2011 by tomerk