Quote from HMW on September 6, 2012, 7:37 am

Just a random idea: you could tweak the colour correction and/or HDR settings to make it look like the light in the map changes, while it actually doesn't...

Quote from josepezdj on September 10, 2012, 6:02 am

HMW wrote:

Just a random idea: you could tweak the colour correction and/or HDR settings to make it look like the light in the map changes, while it actually doesn't...

Oh, you mean with the color_correction entity? good point

Quote from josepezdj on December 1, 2012, 2:38 pm

Sorry for the double post. But the thing is that I think I've found something really helpful and I didn't want to make a new topic out of it since it is completely related to this one

Some time ago, when I was about to release the Second Exodus v2.0, I found all these problems related to the reflections on the water's surface. Apart from all discovered above that allowed me to have the skybox and water into the map very well set up, there still was an annoying issue that I only found right after I released the map... Some of you will know that depending on the Shader Detail video settings, only certain reflections are allowed. The skybox and the entities (marked to "Render in fast reflections") can only be seen if the shader detail setting is HIGH or VERY HIGH.

The problem is that when the Shader Detail is set to Medium, it is not only that you can't see the skybox and entities reflected, but, unless you have a very well made custom water material prepared for all the cases, all that you will see is some annoying flashy water reflections like in this solution video that Sickle recorded of my map playthrough.

Well, in that time HMW helped me out to be able to run the command "buildmodelforworld" that stores a 'cheaper' version of your map inside the bsp file (here is the thread). But there's a terible drawback, overall when you want to upload your map to the workshop: this command doubles your bsp's size!...

OK, after some research over the internet, I found this helpful thread in here:
http://forums.thinking.withportals.com/portal-two/console-commands-and-variables-for-all-in-game-options-t4031.html. Where it says the number that corresponds to each Shader Detail option when talking of the console commands to change them: setting.gpu_level: 0 = low, 1 = medium, 2 = high, 3 = very high

So I reminded having seen something like "GPU<=1" into some water materials. After I searched, I found some of them that included this kind of 'conditional' parameters... So I took all that information and included into my custom water material the following lines:

"GPU<2?$forceenvmap" 1
"GPU<2?$envmap" env_cubemap
"GPU>=2?$reflecttexture" _rt_WaterReflection

PROFIT! When the shader detail is below 2 (High) then the engine doesn't even try to build reflections, but it produces a semi-real-reflection making use of the env_cubemap to "mimic" something similar to the water's reflections (completely ugly though :p); but the flashy stupid reflections are gone! And the water material is prepared for all shader detail settings possibilities, ofc including the high /very-high ones where the skybox and entities are reflected properly.

I hope this will be helpful for you guys!