I am in the process of making a swimming pool and would like to give it that tropical feeling (you know the kind with the coral and water plants and such), but don't know how to make the water transparent enough so that the terrains are visible through it. I have come across a couple of sites that have pictures relating to what I have described,how do they do this? I tried to increase the tranparency of my water, but it looses its color and looks crappy. Can someone please help me?

you might want to try reducing ambience or specularity

Specularity and reflection will inhibit the transparency, But so will diffuse and ambient. Also lighting and camera angles. Here are some guide line I use when making materials: Value or Optic Channels: Ambient and Diffused, Added together never = over 100% Reflection and Transparency, Added together never = over 100% Reflection and Diffused, Added together never = over 100% ( with Refection and Diffused, take into consideration that Diffused is the primary value as opposed to ambient ) When using a texture window to drive a value channel enable Alpha Scaling ( option at the bottom of mapping modes ) With alpha scaling enable the slider will set how much alpha is used drive the channel, instead of it being automatic 100%.

Oh yeah, that really clears things up for me. NOT!!!! Why is it when someone asks a simple question, the techno babble seems to spew forth profusely? I just want to know how to make a water plane transparent enough so that a terrain lying a little bit below the plane can be seen. Is that so hard?

it isn't techno babble. if you are editing a texture, those are the settings you must alter. if you can read, you should have seen these labels.

I'd suggest you check out applying the different water materials in the presets to your water plane. Most of those are transparent to varying degrees. There's even once called 'tropical lagoon' or something along those lines. Try them all till you find the one that comes closest to what you want, then tweak that one a bit. The 'lines of light' are done by using a 'gel' on a light source with what's called a 'caustic' pattern. I believe there's at least one somewhere in the texture library inside the materials editor. There are also a number of them available for download, I just can't remember where exactly I got them. I have accumulated about a dozen so far.

Also, if the water textures don't work as well as you'd like, experiment with some of the glass textures. If it's in a swimming pool, that could very well work.

I've been to the site in France and downloaded some images. They are great and work well and are all set at 512x512 so them import very well.