Invisible water

[ZabuzaXtreme]

Hello,i bought a GOTY Oblivion edition because my old oblivion that i bought doesn't function properly but i have one things that bug me is the dissapearing water.It never happened to my old oblivion but it happened to the GOTY edition @_@ . I don't put so much mods though so what really happened ? Can anyone reply to me ?

[Striker879]

Check in your oblivion.ini (located in your Documents and Settings folder or My Documents for Win XP NOT oblivion_default.ini located in your Oblivion folder) and see if you have bUseWaterLOD=0 which removes all water. The correct setting is bUseWaterLOD=1.

[ZabuzaXtreme]

Check in your oblivion.ini (located in your Documents and Settings folder or My Documents for Win XP NOT oblivion_default.ini located in your Oblivion folder) and see if you have bUseWaterLOD=0 which removes all water. The correct setting is bUseWaterLOD=1.

Well i do what you have instruct and the result come up in a weird way. When i was in a far distance away from the land i could see water but the other were just plain blank.Whenever i go near the water disappear.Do you think it has to do with the open cities mod or is the game ?

[Striker879]

I don't want to say that it's not Open Cities for sure, but I don't recall ever seeing a problem like yours reported in relation to Open Cities. Was the bUseWaterLOD=0 and you had to change it to bUseWaterLOD=1?

 

I use Koroush Ghazi's Oblivion Tweak Guide for information a lot. Here's some excerpts from the section dealing with the water settings in the Oblivion menu for you to compare and see if your settings are different.

Water Detail: If set to High, this option allows the water's surface to appear slightly more realistic. The difference is very difficult to see in screenshots - at Normal the reflections are slightly less detailed and more blocky than High due to the lower surface resolution of the water. The performance impact is not significant by itself, however neither is the visual impact, so if you're struggling for FPS in outdoor areas with water, set this to Normal. Note that the blockiness of distant reflections on water can't be resolved with this setting - see the uGridsToLoad variable in the Advanced Tweaking section.

 

Water Reflections: This setting enables or disables reflections on the surface of water. The screenshot comparisons above show the obvious impact: when set to Off, water appears much less realistic because it appears as a solid block of color. The performance difference should not be significant enough to warrant turning this option Off, however if you experience a lot of mouse lag/low FPS around water, turning this Off will help. Note that you can use several bUseWaterReflections variables to add more objects which can be reflected in the water - see the Advanced Tweaking section.

 

Water Ripples: This setting controls the appearance of ripples on the surface of water when objects interact with it. It has no impact on the general ripples displayed on the water's surface, only the ripples initiated by characters (including your own) when swimming/wading through water. Once again the performance impact of this options should not be significant on most systems, however if you find that swimming or wading - particularly in 3rd person view - is giving you lower FPS, then disable this option.

I would suggest trying Normal for the first, Enabled on the second and Disabled on the third for testing purposes.

 

This next section I've excerpted is the advanced tweaks for your oblivion.ini file.

[Water Variables]

 

bUseWaterReflectionsMisc=1

bUseWaterReflectionsStatics=1

bUseWaterReflectionsTrees=1

bUseWaterReflectionsActors=1

 

The above settings control the additional reflections possible on the surface of water areas. When set to 1, they allow nearby trees, objects, and other characters to reflect in the water. Note that this reduces FPS in busy areas, and that the additional reflections are only visible when you and the objects are closer to the water.

 

uDepthRange=125 - This option controls the depth of water visibility from above. The higher the value, the clearer the water appears, however some water glitches may also start becoming apparent, and FPS may be reduced as well.

 

bUseWaterDepth=1 - If set to 0, water becomes completely opaque (i.e. you cannot see into it at all from above). This can resolve some of the visual glitches which result from changing the uGridsToLoad value, and can also improve FPS, at the cost of some realism.

 

uNumDepthGrids=3 - Also appears to control the depth of water visible, with lower values making water less transparent. If set too high this results in glitches, but if set to 1 can resolve issues with the uGridsToLoad value being higher than 5 and improve FPS as well.

 

bUseWaterLOD=1 - If set to 0 removes all water.

 

fSurfaceTileSize=2048.0000 - Controls the size of the water texture grids. The smaller this value, the smaller the size of texture tiles, and the faster and more tightly packed the water ripples will appear.

Here just set each to the default value that is suggested for testing purposes and see if your water problem is still there.

[ZabuzaXtreme]

Wow it worked,all i need is to change the bUseWaterLOD and the fSurfaceTileSize settings.Thanks man Kudos for you !!!

[Striker879]

Coolio ... glad you got something to splash around in again.

[cultofbyron]

I had a similar problem to this after running a LOD Gen, except the water close to me that intersected with land disappeared. I could still swim in it and see it when I was in it but I couldn't see the surface from the land. Changing all four of the reflections settings from 0 to 1 and ugridsload from 11 to 5 in the ini fixed it for me. Thanks Striker :thumbs: