Thanks, will certainly look into the toolset on youtube and catch up with what you guys are mentioning since i last saw s2 engine which has to be many years now lol.
As for the water plane as what @Sage1969 was talking about is very much doable without animated textures already.
The PBR material has the diffuse, normal roughness etc.. but also 4 detail layers with both diffuse and normal, all textures have their own uv modifications of offset, scroll and scaling, which all used together with different normalmaps can produce some very interesting results when it comes to water. As mentioned before, the only thing that is missing is some form of volume for underwater(mix of post fx and camera trickery) and vertex movement for the surface of the water.
All the opacity and and alpha is taken care of. As for edge depth transparency, this is a bit more special case as it requires a unique depth buffer to be passed into the material. We did this with the new ocean system on an older dev version(still unreleased lol) before shaders were being upgraded.
When I come to the water shaders again which should be next few weeks if I'm lucky, I can take a look then and see how we can go about trying to support everyone's water wishes lol
edit: Starfire got there before me