mojira.dev
MCPE-236991

Water appears milky/white when "Reflections" is disabled in Vibrant Visuals (even at night), impacting accessibility for lower-performance setups

In Vibrant Visuals, water relies heavily on reflections (SSR/IBL) for a realistic look. When disabling "Reflections" (for performance reasons, as even Low/Med/High uses significant GPU on mid/low-end devices), the water appears undesirably milky/white, even at night under a dark sky. This reduces immersion and makes it challenging to distinguish water from solid blocks or air in caves/rivers at night.

  1. Create/Edit a world with Vibrant Visuals enabled (in Experimental Features or Video Settings).

  2. Go to Settings > Video > Reflections: Off (or disable VV entirely for comparison).

  3. Wait for night (or use /time set night).

  4. Approach any water source (river, lake, fountain).

What Happens (Current Behavior):

  • The water looks milky/white, with opaque edges and no depth. It appears less appealing than basic vanilla rendering. (Attach your screenshots here: The red-highlighted area perfectly illustrates the issue – milky white water at night without VV/reflections vs. with them.)

Expected Behavior:

  • Without reflections, water should naturally darken (blue/black at night), using stronger biome tinting, improved ambient/diffuse lighting, or a low-res fallback IBL (precomputed cubemap for sky/clouds). It shouldn't depend entirely on SSR, as not everyone can use it due to FPS limitations (e.g., 30-60 FPS on mobiles/low-end PCs).

  • Similar to other PBR engines: BRDF with diffuse/refraction/ambient terms that don't default to white.

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After consideration, the issue is being closed as Working as Intended.

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