(here)

I think the extra Volumetric Fog water has is completely unnecessary.
All it does is make terain behind waterfalls very ugly.

It also limits the players vision significantly compared to vanilla. And it's quite performance heavy and reponsible for many bugs

(in order, fog on, fog off, vanilla)

And I've discovered yet another problem with the current approach to water.
It's impossible to tell different biomes apart as you can't see the water tint.

Rn there's no tint at all. Ig it could be added but without a solid texture it'd still be too subtle to notice

During noon shadows appear "stretched" on the sides of blocks. This looks weird imo

Lava appears too red. It looks like tomato sauce

Specular reflections tend to wash out the texture details at certain angles
Makes the material look super flat

(Obsidian seems to suffer most from this)

Leaves are too shiny and metallic. They look... well metallic

Idk if this a bug or not but blacks are extremely washed out with Vibrant Visuals

My skin's hand is fully black (#000000) but with VV it appears to be light gray during the day

Regular blocks also seem washed out to me but to a lesser degree

Visibility underwater is greately reduce with VV enabled.

This is a major hindrance and will force players to temporarily turn off VV when working on anything underwater.

The underwater aspect of Vibrant Visuals should be reworked for better visibility (hopefully matching the clarity of non-VV)

So to sum up my issue with VV water are
- It lacks readibility forcing players to turn VV off
- It strays too far from the vanilla style
- It realies too heavily on caustics to remain visible

Another example. Can you tell that the lake isn't filled in correctly with Vibrant Visuals enabled?

Here's some more issues with water.
This ties to what I was talking about but the readibility of water also relies heavily on water caustics. Due to a bug where caustics don't appear on translucent blocks you can see (or rather can't see) that water is almost invisible with VV enabled

Another idea is to make the water caustics also be animated based on the way the water is flowing, but that wouldn't help in interiors or dimensions without skylight so it should be only supplementary way to convery information about the water state

A shader that stays closer to vanilla in this regard is Complementary Reimagined. It keeps the vanilla water texture.
Sure it's less realistic but you can still easily tell how the water flows.

I don't think you need to completely scrap the current water style, but just add a regular texture to it.

Can you tell the way the water is flowing in the above screenshots? Not really until you turn off VV.

The current way to rendering water is more akin to how "realism focused" Java shaders do it, but it falls into the same issue of making water hard to work with.

(Thread)
Water no longer has a texture and purely works off PBR. This poorly conveys information about the state of the water.

This will likely result in players having a temporarily turn off VV when working on technical builds, where having the water flow in very precise ways can be very important

pleasure as always

Jake Black