Let's have a thread about mirrors

Let's have a thread about mirrors

It's always sad to go into a restroom and find all the mirrors smashed, foggy or replaced by some weird hologram thing.

You'd think after so many games showed them in the 00s, they'd be a standard part of engines.

doom 3's mirrors were awful, the reflections animations looked nothing like what your character was actually doing

>game doesn't have mirrors because the developers don't care about anything and have no creative spirit

That's not a mirror, it's a cubemap.

Why are you so obsessed with mirrors, Sup Forums? Do you see demons in them?

>Believing this
>Wanting the developers to waste resources on something that will be noticed by about 5 people.

Mirrors are completely worthless. There is no reason to have them at all.

oh wait

Including overwatch.

That whole area was my favorite part of mp2

A grassy field is the one holding the camera.

do you have the full video of this?

You realize that first person and third person animations aren't the same thing right?

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10/10

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Sadly no. I wonder how he could be sneaking around in such a manner to be caught looking that demonic.

These are just unreachable rooms with a copy of the player character in them.

Show me a mirror that you can walk behind and I'll be impressed.

Amazing Frog has working mirrors you can walk behind. Too late to take back your claims of being impressed.

Not all games use that technique, some render the scene to a texture (cubemap) from mirror POV, either in real-time or when the level loads. This results in either blocky mirrors or a trashy estimation but it's 'gud enuf'

Lord of the Rings Online.

The reflection may be super low resolution for whatever reason, but its a free-standing mirror and has an accurate reflection.

All these AAA single player games should be ashamed for not having them.

The rain does in fact reflect like that in game, despite this being a bullshit. The headlamps, taillamps and all the mirrors also have fully functioning reflections in them. With the reflections in the headlamp and taillamps being properly inverted.

Deadly premonition has working mirrors iirc and blankets

How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Arent Real?

This is not a technique any modern game uses. Most reflections in games are cube maps generated from the opposing perspective at a much lower lod, resolution and rendered at only a handful of frames a second. If it's a static mirror it could be just 1 or 2 frames a second omitting certain details you aren't likely to notice to save on performance.

Would you rather:

>no mirrors

>a shitty general texture to make it seem like a reflection

>a more texture that's area-specific to make it seem like a reflection

>actual reflection techniques that have proven to be resource hungry

>shitty reflection technique that's meh in quality but at least there's reflection

Fucking Duke 3D had working mirrors.

Yes, it shows that the devs care. Its not like you are gonna get any content in turn anyway.

Man Arma 3 barely runs the shit it actually strives to be good at (ballistics, engine shit, AI) at more than 2.5 FPS on a fucking super computer. Thank BIS you even got reflections.

In gmod you can apply mirror texture to literally anything and it works.

Obviously the bottom one.

I briefly worked on this game, the rendering engine for this and a lot of other racers is built from the ground up with a different methodology in respect to reflection modeling and vfx. It's neat stuff, but a lot of it is difficult to pull off effectively in games that don't follow the same rules of perspective as racers.

Doesn't that happen because game engines often just use a single texture image for a reflection of something? I remember in Boarderlanes 2 if you got really close to the water puddles in town you would just see big squares of a city that was at a completely different angle than you were at.

Is this an Unreal Engine thing?

This. Nothing so depressing as seeing yourself as an old bald guy so realistically.

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What did you do for the game? Forza 6 is easily the GOAT racing game imo.

ARMA 3 runs awesomely even on rather old comps these days, it's the netcode that's fucking garbage.

The whole having to sync the server fps to client fps is what fucks it.

What you're describing are cube maps, not reflections.

It's quick and dirty old school way of faking reflections.

Can someone simply explain why mirrors are so hard to do in modern games, and why so many devs opt out of doing them?

I'm looking at you Mankind divided, the amount of fucking mirrors in that game, and the fact that none of them work is just sad. HR had the same problem, but had no where near as many mirrors.

>man stuck in 90s forced to come to terms with two decades of advancement

>hese are just unreachable rooms with a copy of the player character in them.

Welcome to 15 years ago.

Not just Unreal, many developers use this technique where they just prerender few cube maps and use them randomly on any reflective surface. Valve used this in HL2 and Portal too.

>Except ArmA 3 has functional PIP "Mirrors" That a pretty useful

>server fps
you probably meant tick rate?

>Can someone simply explain why mirrors are so hard to do in modern games, and why so many devs opt out of doing them?

There's no one reason, but in most cases it means you have to render twice as much, also a lot of games cull what's behind you...mirrors fuck that up.

It's very engine specific though as to why you can/can't do mirrors.

Then make them important. Make them part of a puzzle or a gimmick section or just put up secret rooms behind them.

Because it requires essentially twice the rendering and with all the technology (lighting, complicated textures and assets, etc) that goes into big budget games, this means performance would be effected drastically.

This is why in many games that do have them they end up doing them at noticeably worse resolutions in the reflections.

There's no real benefit to do it, either, most of the time.

No game engine properly simulates light, so if a dev wants to make a reflective surface they have to do a workaround, some techniques take up a lot of processing power but look good, some don't but in turn look notably worse, rather than trying to tackle the problem in an otherwise graphicly impressive game they just slap a "shiny" texture on it and call it a day.

Of course the engine is state of the art, considering fucking Microsoft pays for the games at least it better look pretty.

>enemies can see you through mirrors
This actually caught me really off gaurd when I played pic related.

>
>flying over ocean
Nah, that's a beach selfie. If you look at the pixels you can even see that he's tried to shoop the iPhone off the reflection in his shades.

Fake reflections are worse than no reflections

If you want to be pedantic, sure, but in the case of ARMA it's literally a fps value on the server side.

Any examples of fake reflections

What if it's a mirror in a tiny ass room like a bathroom, couldn't they just render the bathroom again as well, I don't see why something like that would be so complex. Nor, mirrors on buildings and shit I can see being highly complex and difficult.

OP's pic

All those times you look into a reflection and it shows the same image no matter where you are

Overwatch does it if you look at Widowmaker's ass

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See OP

The question becomes, again, why add it?

It's something you're creating for one tiny ass thing like a bathroom, then why bother? It's an extra amount of work for no purpose.

If you can pull enemies into that bathroom, or see the mirror and anything interesting out of the door at the same time, then the problem still exists as well in that it will easily be capable of tanking performance.

i don't get it

So basically it just comes down to devs being lazy and taking the easy way out.

That's because the majority of FPS games use 1st-person viewmodels

Look at the sunglasses lens before and after he shoots the light

>game has working mirrors AND the characters sleep under covers
>everything else about the game is laughable or stupid

Guess the game.

>What if it's a mirror in a tiny ass room like a bathroom

Worked fine in older games where you could easily cull the rest of the level geometry and the lighting was static and nothing fancy at all, but these days even trying to render a bathroom twice can be enough to completely fuck performance, especially if you have dynamic lighting and reflective properties on the tiles themselves.

not caring about little details = not caring about the game.

i just noticed that cj has pretty noticeable scoliosis

ARMA 3 does perfect fucking mirrors.

Pic related.

It's just the reflection maps for a few things that are shit.

>Look at the sunglasses lens before and after he shoots the light

now i get it

No? If you think that's lazy I don't think you understand at all what goes into video game creation. This is the pointless kind of feature that wastes development time better spent elsewhere for no gain whatsoever, and also has to come with several stipulations and still is going to end up being a performance dropper when you go into it.

Mirrors might be "little details" to the player, but they're a big fucking deal as far as the engine is concerned.

Mirrors are more fun than television

Twitch.tv Chat was a mistake

>So basically it just comes down to devs being lazy and taking the easy way out.

Spoken like a true 12 year old.

Dp is amazing

There's actually a PIP (mirror) setting in Arma3 so OP is pretty dishonest but I think even on max the visors still do that.

Filename.

the filename is bad and didn't help

>developers always talk about how awesome their graphics and technology are
>b-but just ignore mirrors gais!

Really depends on how many reflecting surfaces Ill be around. If its a city obviously I just need something that "gets the job done" and wont rape my computer.

If Im in a bathroom in a single-player game and there is a mirror in there it better look good.

Highlights and mirror reflections aren't the same thing.

Every modern game has accurate highlights from light sources in the room. It takes almost no extra processing power compared to regular diffuse lights.

The can of worms only opens when you need the light to hit one object and then another.

Ground Zeroes did mirrors neat. In cutscenes there is a mirror and if you reskin mod the mirror still accurately reflects it.

Clearly you're too young to have played the DS remake of Mario 64, Viridi.

You CAN reach the room in the mirror.

And then you leave it through the mirrored door and end up in a limitless white void.

I think max payne 2 doe that and the result is better than todays wacky reflexes.

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>In cutscenes

r u dense bud

if you reskin his suit it also reskins what the "mirror" shows, it uses the same texture

This is just screen space reflexions, doesnt work well with alpha textures so it is only applied in the right angle.

How is such a thing even possible?

Arma 3 engine sucks because it doesnt use more than 1 core. It uses it for the graphics drawcalls and the physics. They fucked up and fucked up badly.

>Arma 3 engine sucks because it doesnt use more than 1 core
I'm not sure that's correct user.

No master craftsman in history will agree with you so I guess you're wrong ha ha ha

>mirror is in the game
>it reflects the room
>but you are invisible if you try to look at yourself in it
>turns out you're a vampire
There you go devs. You want mirrors but don't want to deal with them working? Just make your protag a vampire.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the most cataract of them all?

Sorry, but modern games can't have real mirrors because it's too much work for too little payoff and it's also too taxing on the system and it's also illegal.

>Arma 3 engine sucks because it doesnt use more than 1 core

But that's wrong.

Oh fuck, you got me.

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wew lad

Why are you locked in the bathroom?

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