FS WATER CONFIGURATOR

medecin · 01-06-2010, 11:18 PM

Welcome to FS Water Configurator, the world's first water shader-file editor for Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

With the release of Flight Simulator X, Microsoft have added many new graphical features to the Flight Simulator franchise. People are in awe of the fantastic effects such as light bloom, bump mapping, increased autogen levels, and wet taxiway and runway effects. However, no other addition to the engine has had a greater impact on the community than the all-new water reflections.

In past versions of Flight Simulator the water that was presented used barely-visible animations, very limited graphical effects and a reflection effect that was typically used for every reflective object in the simulation. Thus this reflection was always static and never indicative of its surroundings.

As with all games and applications, people expect improvements to be made with new releases, improvements that present newer, more advanced techniques that can improve the overall experience in one way or another. These improvements often come in a variety of forms. In the Flight Simulator world the 3rd party addon is the king of upgrades.

In Flight Simulator X the reflections and other effects are defined using Direct X shaders. By default, the water shader file that comes with the simulation yields only one level of reflection, and includes sun lighting, moon lighting and base texture saturation levels. All these values are static making the water behave and appear the same in all situations, a trait which isn't good as in the real world time, weather conditions and location play a big part in the look of water.

FS Water Configurator was created to change all that by replacing the default water shader file with its own. This file presents two levels of reflection and all other effects that are present in the default file, the values of which are all editable through a user-friendly interface. This allows anyone to change the water's appearance to take on any characteristics they wish only by adjusting a few sliders and pressing a button.

With FSWC you can make the water look however you want. You can make it look extreme or 'as real as it gets...'

some samples