Water and performance.

[robby2]

Wondering what is best and most utilized. I noticed that many people use a texture instead of actually placing water where water should be. Is this because it is better on performance? Also what textures do you usually use for water if you do.
What I have done is used the water feature and textured under it depending if it's deep water or a river and so on. However if performance is affected I may consider taking the water out and using textures...

 

[Dermmy]

'Water' definitely has a performance hit. I used to use it, but tend to use textures more now.

You won't notice the performance hit on a small meandering stream, but textures are definitely the way to go for that anyway. 'Water' looks best used in large areas like lakes etc, but that IS a performance crunch.

Which textures are best? You choose lol... DMDrake has a series of nice textures I think he calls 'stream', I was gonna check, but the DLS won't load for me this morning. Let's see if I can get this reply to post. Come on Auran, get your servers together.....

Andy

 

[aardvark1]

A question then about ... water.

If a route has a lot of water in various locations, how does one get rid of the water?

Guess you could raise the level of the terrain, but would the water texture still be there, creating a performance hit?

Thanks,
Ron

 

[davesnow]

Just use the "Delete Water" button:

 

[robby2]

Deleting the water is definitely not an issue for me, but the amount probably is, my line runs around the Bay of Chaleur in northern NB which makes for lots of water, I think ill consider finding a good texture to replace it with...

Let me know if yall have good suggestions on textures for water that you use..

thanks,
Robby

 

[stagecoach]

Ive used lots of water for boats on the sea and rivers and have not noticed much difference than without it. its scenery that causes me most problems.

 

[Tokkyu40]

I also have some streams running down hill and the water only lays level, so I sometimes can't use it. For those cases texture is the easiest solution.
Burying the water doesn't keep it from killing your frame rate. If you have a slower machine, you should always use grid mode to check for extra buried water that could take up system resources.

Claude