Water not correctly rendered?

[buteo]

Hello All,

in order to learn the tools, I am trying to create a small (just one tile) landscape of an island in the sea.
Terrain creation and texturing for land areas are OK. "Flight test" also succeeded.

For the water areas I then used the WaterAlpha tool and ended up, as prescribed, with sixteen 2048px x 2048px patches (DDS/DXT3) where black in the alpha channel serves as the mask for water areas (alpha channel checked in another tool to be certain).
So far so good (I think).

However,in the Condor sim itself, the water areas are just black, there is no texture, no colour, and no effect.
What am I missing?
Should there perhaps be some water texture or anything else in the "local" folder for this specific landscape?
Or how would those "water mask holes" normally be filled?

Thanks for all tips!

BlackSea.jpg

PS.
Don't worry about the strange land texture -- I used a map, for easier checking.
Note also that this is in the Mediterranean, not in the Black Sea, so the colour of the water is not correct...

UPDATE
After posting above I had the idea to change the sim time from 12:00 to 08:00, and in the area of the sun reflection can now see that the water does indeed have some structure (effect?) after all. But the colour seems still wrong.
(Sorry for the large image, but at a smaller scale the effect is difficult to see.)

BlackSea2.jpg

[EDB]

Play with the grayscale and transparancy of the water mask...

[wickid]

The water alpha is just the wave effect. You still need water textures. Try making the water areas plain blue and see how it looks then.

[buteo]

Many thanks for the quick replies! This did the trick indeed.
So those alpha channel masks are complementing the (water) texture, not replacing it; this was what I had misunderstood.

Bonus question:
With DXT3 compression, the alpha channel does not have to be full black, but can have any grayscale value.
What would be the effect, in Condor, of a different grey value (say, 50%, a.k.a.RGB 128,128,128 or .5, .5, .5)?
It would normally change transparency, but for water in Condor that may not be meaningful, as there is nothing to see below the water anyway (I think). Would it affect the look of the "wave structure" effect perhaps?

Thanks again for your help!

[EDB]

You can control how much you see of the underlaying texture and the amount of the reflection of the water effect.

[buteo]

Thanks again, this is a very responsive forum!

Answering my own bonus question, I did a little test, setting the alpha channel "level" first to 50% (halfway between black and white), then to 90% (almost but not quite white). This is of course (too) extreme, but I wanted to see a clear effect.
See image below for a side-by-side comparison. (Again, my apologies for the size but at smaller scale the effect is not visible clearly enough.)

As EDB says, the difference is in the "tone" (how much does the texture "shine through") and the reflectivity: Note the sun reflection in the left and the lack thereof in the right screenshot; both were of course taken at the same sim time of day (9:00).
Besides, the "wave structure" becomes more blurred at "whiter" alpha levels, it seems.
So we clearly have lots of options to play around with to achieve the best effects, depending on location (and taste). Nice!

AlphaCompare.jpg