More Awesome Than You!

I have a nice dual-processor PowerMac G5 with 4GB DDR SDRAM and a moderately decent ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card coupled with a Cinema Display screen but all the renditions of water are lamentably flat.I see the wave and ripple effects in lots of stories I read but my machine just gives me flat blue water and no detail at all.
Any tips?

I think you need a mod for the wave effects. Should be RLS-Shaders.package that came with Gunmod's lighting mod.

Eh? I thought that it was standard and not a mod???

The lighting mods definitely affect the water effects, even w/out the shaders. My pool is really flat-looking with lighting 2.1, whereas it used to look pretty and dynamic, but I'm too enamored of the natural lighting to get rid of it, and I can't stand the plastic effect of the pool shaders, so that's no solution either.

RLS-Shaders.package contains specific settings for the pool shaders and adds waves. I don't get nice water without it.

It does NOT affect other shaders, and is unrelated to the whole 2.0/2.1 custom shaders issue which disabled bumpmapping.

I don't use a lighting mod at the moment, but keep the RLS-Shaders.package in for the pool water effects.

Ayslhyn:
You know, its weird. But, I've had the same card throughout TS2's lifespan and I've only recently noticed water effects. The most notable have been pool water effects. There are a lot more ripples and waves now than before. Before, it was static blue water. Since I haven't installed a water effect hack, the only thing I can think of is that it might have changed with either Family Fun of Glamour Life.

Ah. Is that why the pool's flat? No bumpmapping? Huh.

I just don't like the shaders b/c the water looks plastic.

But I'm mac-using and cannot have either Family Fun or Glamour Life because these packs are not re-coded for the mac.

No? Pools are "flat" because their shaders simply aren't that interesting in a default game. That's all RLS-Shaders edits: it overrides the default pool shaders and makes them more interesting, adding wave effects and caustics by some ingenious shader and vertex programming. The engine was capable of it all along, Maxis/EA Games just disabled it all prior to shipping.

The "no bumpmapping" I refer to has to do with the cheat Gunmod would have you add to userstartup.cheat.

And of course you need a vidcard with full Pixel Shader 2.0 support to benefit from the new shaders at all. Older cards simply can't do the math.