Is there a limitation to what you can do with water using the Quake III Arena engine?

Water just doesn't look good at all, it looks too fake.

Q3 is more advanced than Unreal (IMO), just look at the graphics...

Quick answer;

This is not Unreal!

Being an Epic boy myself, I do understand that the epic engine is FANTASTIC in it's own accord, but obviously the Q3 (be it licensing or otherwise) engine has merits of it's own that spurs this many developers to use it for so many games recently. And even in the past (which leads me to believe it's licensing that does most of the decision making) games such as SOF1 were Quake 2 based.

So don't question, just enjoy Or incase that doesn't work, start making a mod to make the water look better.

Once again, why is water better in Unreal Tournament than in any Quake III Arena engine based games?

This has nothing to do with whether I enjoy the games or not. I think both engines are great. But given the fact that the Quake engine seems to be pretty good why is water so generic looking? And I can't make any mods....not enough time for that at the moment...too busy raising children and a family. When it comes to graphics, I must say that textures in Unreal Tournament (at least in mods like Tactical Ops) are pretty good and so are the ones in the Quake III Arena engine but water in Quake is pathetic. Is it just that developers decide to leave it out due to performance penalties in slow machines?

ut2k3 should be out around then as well, well at least the mp demo.

Water?

There is NO NEED WHATSOEVER for water to look this bad.  I've done some custom water textures for Elite Force (Another Q3 based game by Raven) with amazing results.  Check out theses screenies on my site.

Of course, you can't always afford the performance hit that reflective water gives, but transparent or semi-transparent water would sure look a lot better than most of what Raven gave us in SoF2 MP.

Of course, you're supposed to be fraggin' the baddies, not going for a swim.