hey, I have been playing around with trying to get a better water effect using a jpg screenshot of the map as the reflection on the water surface.

so far I have managed to get the right amount of movement on the water surface using sin, and I have a nice ripple effect using a couple of scrolling ripple textures with an alpha channel, now all I need to have the jpg screenshot act like a reflection.

how i see it is that the reflection should work in the same was as a sky shader so that the reflection always stays the same distance away from the player just like a normal reflection would, and like the sky textures do...

any ideas, posts relevent to this issue, I cannot use the search function here for some reason, I hope this makes sence.

If you check out rgoer's Sunset on Coruscant map, he made some reflective water in the same way that you make "shiny" mettallic surfaces--by mapping the "reflection" texture stage with tcGen environment. I think if you want the reflection to appear flat, and not distorted by the environment-mapping, you have to run it through a sphere filter in PhotoShop or something. Somebody else can expand on that since I don't have the experience with it...