Beta 18 for the Mac needed to arrive now that there is pretty water! Get it here. Here is a video of what’s new:

Water with skybox reflections is finally in. The shader was a bit hairy because despite what I was reading online and in books no matter what I did whenever the player would walk around the skybox would end up stretching and skewing in an unusual fashion, but at the center it was always clean. That’s when it became clear that for the fake reflection I was doing the water plane needed to shift with the camera so that it would always reflect the skybox properly. This ofcourse interacted interestingly with the perlin noise shader for distorting the surface normals to make the reflections more interesting. The solution was to transform the shader with the opposite of the real world player coordinates (x and z only) and suddenly you have a shader that looks solid and unmoving despite the entire plane moving along! Here are some nice screenshots to show the effect.