I would like a mod to make the water look better. Right now I have "improved water" installed, but as far as I know it only changes the underwater looks. I don't have SI, so it needs to be a water mod that does not need SI.

I too am interested in this, specifically a cure for Oblivion's rather crude distant water reflections. An oldish mod exists that tackles this, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23372, but as the author states it is a beta release and has issues. Are there more modern (and trouble-free) alternatives?

-Decrepit-

I would personally recommend Enhanced Water.

Links:


http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8011

EDIT: Here are some side-by-side comparisons of different mod work...

http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/8011-1-1192049377.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/8011-2-1192049378.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/8011-3-1192049378.jpg
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/images/8011-4-1192049379.jpg

There are a number of water mods in existence, though my personal choice is generally http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8011, rather than trying to tell you why I like it, I'll just let you look at the screenshots, and decide if it's what you want yourself. Some of the screenshots also show comparisons to other water mods, which might help you decide if this one is for you or if you'd rather try a different one.



I know of no other mod that does the same thing as that one, and unfortunately, while the mod works well to remove the jagginess on the distant reflections, the blur effect applies to the nearby ones too, which I don't really like, so I don't use it, myself.

In any case, that mod just replaces the water reflection shader with one that blurs the edges of reflections, it isn't really a substitute for mods that change the values for water in the Construction Set and as far as I know, should work with them.

So, I installed EW, but now I would like to get rid of these pretty ugly reflections of buildings and mountains in the water and replace them with better looking, is that possible?

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/7766/oblivion201101011551128.jpg

Hmmm...what's you're Anti-aliasing level?

I don't see why you have to lose ripples to get the blur - I'm pretty sure the shader could be rewritten to incorporate both smoother reflections and ripples. Unless it's an address space problem, but I can't recall if that's an issue or not with Oblivion's shaders. Unfortunately, I no longer have my fixed copy of ShaderEdit that doesn't crash, so the files don't make any sense to me.

I know that in Morrowind, thanks to the Graphics Extender, one can see waves that rise and fall instead of just a flat surface of water like in Oblivion. Is such a feature possible to recreate in Oblivion, or is the engine modified in such a way that it cannot be done?

Well, I don't see why hacking the Oblivion engine in the same way isn't possible, but that doesn't mean it's easy or that anyone is planning to do it (to my knowledge).