question

Hello HybridNZ,

You should be able to achieve this result by:
- defining an exclusion polygon to remove the water body and reaveal the underlying aerial
- add a custom water polygon on top of that

This way you can have the water effect with the imagery in transparency.

Does this answer your question?

Regards,
Sylvain

Hi,

Ive tried what you said exactly and in many different configurations and it doesn't work unfortunately as below.

Water polys seem broken and the approach suggested by FlyingRaccoon does not work.

Here's an example based on EEKU. There's an excessive sand bar a few kilometers north-east of the airfield (N58.156329 E24.02775):

If I simply attempt to cover it with water, then it introduces an artifact (as expected, because overlapping water polys are not allowed):

If I try to use the previously described method of exclusion + custom water on top, then exclusion works as expected:

However, it's back to the start when I try to add water on top of it:

And I cannot add second water poly either to force water, because overlapping water polys are not allowed and cause artifacts:

So how can I cover the sand bar with water?

It looks like stock terrain is taken into account when summing polygons for the final water value (render or no render, as described in the SDK), which breaks third-party customization.

I believe this is a bug. Stock water polygons under excluded areas should not be included in the final water value, because otherwise we cannot add custom water polys over excluded areas.

In any case, this point system seems too complex. It would be much better if we could just use absolute exclusion polys that always remove water, and absolute water polys that always add them, with overlapping allowed for both types.

Since Asobo can not fix all water mask around the world in a short time. Why not open this possibility for DEV. Please.

One of the way to do it is creating thin stripes of water polygon, but the problem is the reflected light is like zebra pattern (following strip size). It really helps when we can create transparent water from inside SDK, just like Asobo did with official water masks. I found out that water masking was done via CGL, further confirmed by a post somewhere I found in past (using older file will enable water masking in release build) but currently haven't had the knowledge on how to decompile CGLs

Hello,

Has there been any update to this? Water masking is a major feature that us Devs would love to have!

Took the initiative to add this as an idea so that it could be voted on. You can find that here:

https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/idea/1563/proper-water-masking.html

Still trying to shed some light on this topic and wrecking my brain trying to make sense of it:

I'm trying to create a clean slate for a coastal area excluding ALL water polygons.
From what I understand from above this is still not possible and exclusions are only possible INSIDE the existing water polygons. Correct?
The water polygons used in my area of interest seem to be from Openstreetmap (OSM). So this is not perfect and comes with the risk that the excludes won't match anymore once anything happens that causes MSFS to update the water polygons in the area.

Of course this rules out the option of drawing the exclude polygons by hand inside MSFS but requires some in-depth work with GIS tools.

For a starter working with OSM polys seems to work "good enough" though. I'm tiling the polygons before exporting them to QMID15 to minimize the risk of incomplete polygons and artifacts. Still there are some polygons that cause artifacts. Loading the SHP in Scenery Editor shows some issues that are not documented anywhere:

While most polygons are shown file, there's a number of polygons that are either tagged as "OVERRIDE" or "OVERRIDEN":

The tags I'm using for all polygons are as follows:

Trying to make sense of which polygons are tagged as what doesn't help much neither:

YELLOW: OVERRIDEN
RED: OVERRIDE
ALL OTHERS: No Tag

Questions:

1. What do the tags "OVERRIDEN" and "OVERRIDE" mean? What needs to be done to make the polygons valid?

2. Where can I find the waterbody sources of MSFS? TMFViewer from the previous MS FSX SDK can still open the waterbody BGLs created by the MSFS SDK. I have been unable however to locate the MSFS default waterbody BGLs (provided they are saved as BGLs?)

UPDATE... weirdly enough I have been able to solve the issue above by manually drawing the exclude polygons inside MSFS and saving them as shapefiles there (one for lakes, one for ocean water). In that case the exclude polygon doesn't need to match the existing water polygons and can overlap the default polygon's boundaries.

It seems that MSFS uses some kind of proprietary format for shapefiles as compiled shapefiles created inside MSFS behave very different to those with the same attributes and XML definitions created in QGIS, Global Mapper and the like (tried both and on both cases the results inside MSFS look similar as above).

Best case scenario though would be that it's not proprietary and someone could just give us a push into the right direction. Meaning a hint what's required to import existing watermask polygons (or polygons in general) into MSFS. Since Asobo imported OSM polygons into MSFS there must be a way to bring in polygon content from outside into MSFS without having to struggle with messed up imports.

I've given up on polygons for this, but it has been possible to use a texture with an alpha channel floating on top of the surface as some other developers have already done.

I had to make it a simobject to show up, as a normal object it wouldn't outside of development mode for some reason.

However it has to be a very silly height above the surface - 10 to 20 metres and sometimes more - to prevent it from flickering from a distance.

Since this one is so huge - about 20 km across - 20 km of flickering isn't a great look.

I presume this is some sort of alpha channel issue. Does anyone have any idea how to stop it or are we stuck with it? Not much point in taking it any further unless I can cure the flickering.