I have been looking for places with nice water masks and other players were kind enough to recommend several places. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have any.
I have found some in Japan near Kerama Island and west of Nassau and they look great, but all the others seem to be missing which is strange.
My water is kind of greenish, but no details. Unfortunately I can’t post pictures or links to pictures here.
Photogrammetry is on and all settings are on either High or Ultra. The only thing I have switched off is Vsynch and the lens effect.
I have also tested the area with the flamingos and there is no water mask either (I also couldn’t see any flamingos, but that could just be me).
My PC specs:
Windows 10 Pro
Intel i7 7700 @ 4.2 GHz
32GB RAM
GTX 1080Ti
You say you have no water masks, but then say you’ve seen them in Japan. It might be helpful if you post exactly where you think you should have them, so others can confirm by visiting. Nearest airport, and bearing, or exact co-ordinates if possible. Which should be possible as all you need to do is drop a pin on the map, include it in a flight plan, and attach it here.
I asked online where people got their beautiful screenshots from with those watermasks and got several answers. Most of them describing areas.
Several people said the coast of Cuba should have watermasks, I couldn’t see anything there.
Someone said the Withsunday Islands in Australia, but I don’t see anything.
The most concrete example where one player actually sent me screenshots is an airport on Caicos Island (MBSC). We both took off from there and took screenshots and mine look completely different to his. He has really nice corral reefs in the water whilst my water is just milky greenish and that’s it.
Another airport I tested was MYEH. Again, just a greenish milky water texture, but no details.
The other recommendations from other players where rather vague areas, so I won’t include them here, but especially Caicos island is very clearly an area that looks very different on my PC to that of other players and can easily be replicated.
I have comparison shots but I am neither allowed to post pictures or links to the post.
If you take off from MBSC you should see lot’s of watermasks all around the airport, especially to the south.
I have played around with my graphic settings a bit more, but no success.
MBSC certainly seems to have some kind of water masking in effect for me. It doesn’t seem as detailed as some screenshots I have seen, with sub-surface detail added, but it has that pearlescent effect that the default ocean doesn’t have.
Hi @MethodicRain46 and welcome to the forum. Unfortunally only some part of the world have the masks. The MSFS Team is working to update the mask and add those in the sim.
If you want, you can see this thread on the mask. They have discuss and collect some locations in the world where those are been aplied. You have to scroll to the end, because the ones dosent working.
I am fully aware that there are areas without masks. The issue is not missing masks, but areas where some people clearly have masks and others have not. There are no add-ons involved, we all use the same sim and compared the graphics settings.
Some have beautiful corral reefs and subsurface details, others don’t, in the exact same spot.
Does this mean some people have a different MSFS version than others? Because my MBSC water looks completely different to that of others.
Like I said, this is not about missing watermasks. This is about areas where the water looks completely different from one user to the next. We have compared settings and systems and can’t figure out why some see watermasks in a specific area and others don’t.
That is the question. Not missing masks that no one sees.
I have been through the list of watermasks that have been implemented and almost none of them show up in my sim.
