I have a crappy graphics card, it seems it doesnt support pixel shaders, is there anyway of getting my water to look halfway as good as loopix's easy water without using pixel shaders? I dont really want to buy a new card just for fancy water.

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is there anyway of getting my water to look halfway as good as loopix's easy water without using pixel shaders

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Sorry, no. You could try to work with environment mapping, but you'd be still lack of the distortions / waves. Instead you should think about buying a new card, I can hardly believe that you still use a GeForce 2 [or lower], because these cards are so extremely outdated; today's games often require Pixel Shader 1.4 or even 2.0 to run. The video cards today are probably about 20-50 times faster, even one for 100$

lol thanks, I use a geforce4 mx 420, I've never needed a better card but I'll upgrade as soon as i have the cash, thanks.

I would like to contradict this statement, although I don't think it would be nearly as effecient or easy, I think you could do this water effect without a shader. What I mean by this, is if you want the water + wave effect, you could make a terrian with a moving texture assigned to it for the water and then script in the vertexes to move as you would like. The most basic form of this is just random movements on the z axis at small intervales, the most complicated you would have to set disturbances along your water at a few points and then use a bouancy effect that effects each vertex according to the vertexes around it, again moving along the z axis only. I think the actual water effect should be quite simple and could be modified depeding on what you want to achieve. The simplest you would need to assign a portal (sorry I'm not sure if portals that create a mirror are supported by your or all video cards, but I don't think it should because if you do it manually, it would be the equivalent of a dynamic camera view on a surface), and then if you wanted more than a simple mirror water effect you could assign an alpha value (again if you wanted to be complicated about it, you could assign farther away sections to a more visible alpha value), and finally make a static or dynamic texture and assign it to it if you so choose.

As I'm sure you can tell, each one of these steps you would have to take are significantly harder than just assigning a shader to your water, but then again, this is the price for a more hands on/less expensive, (and argueably better looking, and appropriate behaving) water effect.

trooper119, that is one of the most resourceful ideas i have ever heard, thumbs up

Thanks a lot, I appreciate the praise. I'm not sure if anyone has played this game, but I believe Blood Wake (game for XBox, its a ship combat game, not bad if you ask me). They have great water effects that probably use the bouancy (sp) effect on a large scale (across a small sea that you play on in each map), I'm assuming if my memory serves it looks like they use a shader for some of the water (stormy areas I think are just a high rez texture with some effect similar to bump map but I'm not sure) and then calm areas have the much sought after water reflection (once again this could be done by shader, or by other means), the only thing I couldn't figure out is if your putting that much depth in your water to go up and down (in another words a high density terrain map) how are they applying all of these calculations and still get a good FPS, course bouancy may not be as computationally taxing on the computer as I may believe. Hmmm, just thinking out loud. Has anyone else tried simulation of waves with a bouancy effect? The reason I ask is I'm wondering if its taxing on the computer or not, and its a simple physics equation (I've seen how Newton's Physics does it, and I think they got the equation wrong because it doesn't look right to me)

Woah thanks Trooper119, that was really helpful, I'll give it a try!

Dude, please don't run in and start trying to code what I have suggested, it works yes, but I don't think its something you could do within a week or something like that, don't jump off the deep end, if this is one of your first experiences within the programming world, you need to start off a lot slower than this. What I suggested should be attempted by moderate to expert programmers only.

Sorry I just saw you were ranked as a newbie, so I don't want you to be discouraged on one of your first tries. Start smaller.

thanks for you're advice though trooper

The simplest and good looking way for me is,to make a video of a few seconds about a sea or river and to play it as loop on a block-map! I got the idea and tested it,it looks very nice!