hudfreegamer: It's a bug introduced with patch 1.3. Current versions still have it. Ubi suggests lowering water reflection quality to fix it.
I found a post on another forum by someone named: AluminumHaste
He said:
". . . for the water reflection issue, you can fix that (worked for me) by using the configuration tool for farcry in the start menu and add those things for water."
I did some more searching and found out more about it. Far Cry comes with something called the Far Cry Configuration Tool. It's in your game folder
Far Cry\Bin32\FarCryConfigurator.exe
You can adjust all settings under the Tool's main tabs. Changing them is exactly the same as changing them in Far Cry.
Go to the Video Options (Advanced) tab, and click on the Customize button on the bottom right. This will open up a new dialog box which contains tabs addressing all of the game's Advanced Video functions, such as Environment Quality, Lighting Quality etc. However unlike the descriptions given in the In-Game Settings section, here you can actually alter the individual components of these settings, and not just use presets like Low, Medium and High. For example if you just want to disable Motion Blur but keep the rest of your Special Effects Quality settings equivalent to High or Very High, you can do so here. Very handy for fine tuning the game.
They can also be changed in the game's console, or by manually editing the .cfg files.
source:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Farcry_7.html Let me know if that works.
I've already been through the .cfg file/configurator tool, and seen that thread. The post is far too vague, and I'm not sure the person you quoted was even fully aware of the exact issue being discussed. I've never found a .cfg entry that fixed the missing landmass reflections, and if one exists it must be cryptically named.
It wouldn't have been altogether implausible though, as I know that there is some kind of bug that causes another effect (the shoreline wave effect) to disappear, and this is due to "e_beach" in one of the .cfg files being reset to 0 for some reason.
Also, a note on the Far Cry configurator tool: I've found it to be a little problematic the last few times I've installed the game. Sometimes settings made via it appear to be ignored. There are two potentially 'active' versions of the main .cfg file, one that's generated by the game, and one that's generated by the configurator tool. I think the latter is supposed to take precedence over the former, but sometime it's apparently ignored. I never remember having any issues with the tool back in the XP days, so I had blamed Windows 7 until last week when I installed XP on a spare PC and had the same issue with configurator settings being ignored. Anyway, it matters little because one can just set everything manually in the game-generated .cfg and that always works.
I'm kind of depressed over how badly this game has aged, and I'm talking in terms of it's technical issues. Games like UT2004 can be run just as successfully as they ever could in their era, but Far Cry is falling apart at the seams with graphical anomalies that are presumably due to it not tolerating modern hardware/software. Even if you run it under XP to solve the landmass reflection issue, water reflections in general are still very buggy. There are tons of other issues with flickering transparencies and certain light sources too. I even tried it on 2008 hardware, with period drivers to match, yet is was still infested with graphical bugs. Unfortunately I don't have any older hardware with which to test it, but I'm sure these glaring anomalies weren't always present. Could be something to do with the major GPU Nvidia changes that took place after the 7 series.
