Ripple Water and ATI Mobility Radeon X1400

Well I've been on SL a year and in that time the whole ripple water thing has defeated me. Sure I get the option to check ripple water - but what happens? Nothing. Except where blue water used to be a muddy puddle appears - so it's back to ripple water off.

Haing tried instaling my drivers and updating them numerous times I simply gave up. Who cares abut rippling water anyway?

Until today when a friend showed me a photo of my island sim with ripple on. Envy & jealousy prevailed. Surely I must be able to see ripples! I mean this is a relatively new laptop - for goodness sake it has 512meg of video ram. So I hit google again.

This time I didn't bother with the ATI drivers, I googled and found a thing called

"Omega Drivers" for ATI Catalyst 7.1 ( v3.8.330 ) - Win XP Home
http://www.omegadrivers.net/

Now I'm usually pretty careful about downloading stuff that isn't directly from a manufacturer, but thought hey lets give it a bash.

And guess what? It worked!!! I now have rippling water - So thanks to the guy who wrote it for making my SL go from drab 3d to glorious technicolor!

Its still not quite perfect yet, but will tweak the settings until I get it right ( and post my findings here )

I'm not much of a forum poster, but hopefully this will help somebody with the same problem.

Take Care

Amelie xx

Ok,

There's a tool with it called the ATI Tray Tools - right click on it to get the tweaks menu and then Standard Tweaks.

Here on the Direct3D Tab I enabled the following:
Override Pixel Shader Verson 2.1
Override Vertex Shader Version 2.0

I also turned on Force Mip-Map filter and set my "Z Compression mode" to 2

I have no idea what this all means - but the water does seem to look a bit better now... or maybe I just "think" it looks better?

The rippling effect at dawn is very nice - but the moon no longer ripples when it gets close to the horizon...

Well I'm enjoying my new view of the world... but it still looks kinda grey and muggy. Being from London in RL I tend to want to escape the grey mugginess in SL.

I try turning the Gamma up in prefs and Woah! EVERYTHING gets brighter - including my desktop and everthing else - ok will have to try something else.

Maybe I should actually search the forum or ask someone rather than sitting here writing all this speculative drivel.

Added:

My friend Mathieau pointed out that I am seeing weather effects for the first time and that the colours shift depending on mood and time of day, so that's one mystery well and truly solved - I think...