/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5059640
they're retarded and/or have other cvars already loaded
the thing about wateralpha in fitzquake and fq-derived engines like QS is that it's sort of a toggle cvar, you set it to anything but 1 and aside from changing water alpha, it also enables three other cvars:
>r_skyalpha
>r_lavaalpha
>r_slimealpha
whose values are only loaded if r_wateralpha is already set to anything other than 1. all three of those override the wateralpha value for their specified liquid types (sky textures are technically a solid-collision liquid volume by the engine), and the defaults for slime and lava are 0, making them totally invisible.

additionally, many older maps are NOT compiled to support transparent water and as such alpha-modified liquids will only show the grey void outside the map (or a hall of mirrors if gl_clear is disabled), not the actual geometry behind it, unless also using r_novis 1, which can bring older computers to a crawl as it disables vis calculation and renders the entire map at all times.