Compared to most other games, default water reflections have always been rather noisy in Sauerbraten. This is particularly noticeable in refractions where players under the surface become harder to pinpoint.
This is due to the water distortion texture having strong normals. These were made somewhat blurrier in Collect Edition and later, but they remained too strong to my taste, so I made this mod accordingly.
Recommended console commands for better quality
/reflectsize 11; vertwater 1; waterlod 3; watersubdiv 3
Use /reflectsize 10
instead if /reflectsize 11
is too demanding for your GPU.
Installation
Extract the ZIP archive and place the packages
directory in your Sauerbraten user data directory, which is located in:
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Sauerbraten\
$HOME/.sauerbraten/
Merge the directory with existing files if there are any.