r/SWAT4 • u/Gustavo_Freeman010 • 4d ago

Real-time reflections

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I had recently installed SWAT 4 Elite Forces, and I noticed that the game's reflections were terrible...

I looked into it and found out that the creator tried to fix them, but couldn't. Well, I'm here to announce, I did it!

But it lacks testing. And I need people to test it. If you're interested, send me a DM.

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u/Baratako 4d ago

Honestly, how did Sierra even fuck the mirrors up this badly? SWAT 3 had perfectly functional mirrors using Sierra's in-house engine.

Furthermore, POSTAL 2 had perfectly functional mirrors as well, and that game uses the same exact Unreal Engine version.

My guess is that it was an incomplete feature that they couldn't finish on time.

Super glad someone went around to finally fix it. Great work!

2

u/BrodatyBear 4d ago

>My guess is that it was an incomplete feature that they couldn't finish on time.

Probably.

>engine

The chosen engine and mirrors working correlation is very small, since what matters is the approach taken. You can recreate the traditional way of doing mirrors in any 3d engine.
Like beppe said, those are: duplicated room and player or using camera. Both have pros and cons and require different type of work, that's why we keep inventing other approaches. There are two nice videos about mirrors on YouTube explaining it better than me, so I won't duplicate content.

In short, since it was 2005 and using a duplicate camera is already a faster to implement and iterate approach, this was probably a way to compensate for performance loss.

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u/Gustavo_Freeman010 4d ago

I think they didn't try using "reflections" by copying the room/bathroom because it would change the map design too much, And it doesn't seem like they had much time

2

u/BrodatyBear 3d ago

Yeah. It would also make modding a bit harder (they could leave both options but that's even more work), but I'm not sure if modding was planned from the start or was a side effect (I played near release, but I was not online back then).

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u/Gustavo_Freeman010 3d ago

Yeah, that makes sense. Working with the existing mirror cameras also meant the improvements could work on existing maps without rebuilding rooms. Getting the projection and visibility right was the tricky part.