Some customers have reported the problem that the water surface does stay gray and the water does not appear after the shaders have finished compiling. Affected engine versions seem to be 4.19 and higher.
Today I finally was able to replicate this issue and I think I have the solution. If you have this problem, please make sure to use the following steps when adding Physical Water Surface to your project:
- Add Physical Water Surface to your project as usual from the Launcher
- In the Engine a little message may appear in the bottom right corner of the screen saying “3 changes to source content files have been detected…”
- You need to close this message by clicking on “Don’t Import”. Physical Water Surface will still be added when you click this option, and everything will work as expected.
- Open one of the maps that come with Physical Water Surface (for example DemoMap). The water will appear after the shaders have finished compiling.
The water shaders will need a few minutes to compile when Physical Water Surface is used for the first time. During this time the water surface also stays gray and does not appear yet. I found that the “compiling shaders” message in the Engine is not very reliably and sometimes disappears too early while the shaders are still compiling. A more reliable indicator is to observe the CPU load of your operating system. If the CPU load is high, this means that the shaders are still compiling.
I will add all of this information to the Wiki pageonce they turn on editing again in the Wiki.
Please let me know if the steps above solve this issue for you! In case you’re still having problems, please feel free to contact me. You can find the support email addresson the Marketplace page.