That did give us our first software rendered transparent water rooms though (Quake had the water opaque unless you had 3DFX card IIRC)
replyGLQuake introduced the r_wateralpha setting, which allowed transparent water, but the maps were still compiled with visibility calculations that assumed the water surfaces were opaque. You got visual artifacts unless you enabled r_novis to ignore the pre-calculated visibility calculations. Modern computers can handle it, but this was a heavy performance cost at the time.
replyTo work around this, people used an unofficial tool to patch the maps to support transparent water:
Yes, essentially with a second rendering pass. Not cheap to implement which is why the game used it relatively sparingly.
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