This is merely a feature request that I’m pretty sure a lot of developers would appreciate. As of right now, we can exclude water to reveal coral reef textures underneath the ocean, but we can’t add transparent water on top of it without having to revert to creative and time consuming methods to accomplish this. With some exceptions, coral reefs are mostly lacking in the sim which is a shame.
Any plans to implement this feature in the near future?
This is so needed. Asobo apparently has an in house tool to accomplish this and they’re done by hand. However there are many places that are not chosen or will take forever to get to them all. Crowd sourcing this would be a great idea if the SDK had the tools to accomplish it.
One example is the NW coast of Florida and AL, the “Emerald Coast” is completely missing its emerald shallow water look and it is a very well known area of the US for that kind of water
Yeah, this feature is already implemented by Asobo. Just not in the sdk, but it’s desperately needed. I lived in Florida 15 years ago while doing my flight training, and the entire coast needs proper water masks.
Would be great to have this feature implemented for the community to add water masks while Asobo can work on their own method they showed off a while ago in a live stream.
I currently work on a project including several tropical islands. Without water masking it’s never going to give that tropical feeling it deserves.
1 - 2 - 3 - Water in Ms Sdk is opaque; and very likely will stay that way.
From what I can see, it’s the so-called “water albedos” that control this. What’s lacking, is documentation how these can be modified (which would be quite useful as many of us agree).
The VFS Projector reveals the following:
VFSProjection\cgl\base\wabworld.cgl
VFSProjection\cgl\base\waterblurmasks.cgl
VFSProjection\cgl\base\waterblurmasksoffline.cgl
VFSProjection\cgl\base\waterclassification.cgl
All of them seem to be global and it is not clear if any of these influence underwater albedos like coral reefs.
Then there are the more detailed CGL files loaded from the cloud like this one, which can be found through tile debugger in DevMode:
https://sunriseworld.akamaized.net/sr-results/water_albedo/2025_01_31/water_albedo/wab032203.cgl?version=0
Files like these most certainly control the display of underwater albedos.
Question now is how we can add these to our packages similarly to the well known sai*.cgl files?
The process for that might be pretty simple and straightforward - if it would just be enabled in the SDK that we can write CGL files with the appropriate header - and MSFS2024 being able to find those.
