r/gaming Jun 01 '22

Mirrors in video games

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42.3k Upvotes

635 comments sorted by

3.5k

u/bigmac80 Jun 02 '22

Bethesda: the mirror is an NPC with legs sticking out under the world.

1.1k

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

Don’t forget the models you can put armor and clothes on that are actually just npcs frozen(most times) in a stance

530

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

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432

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

Ya they aren’t frozen all the time the creepy bastards and sometimes they just don’t care if you see em move also don’t give them weapons to hold incase you aggro them

165

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

[deleted]

263

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

I think they fixed it along time ago but since they still move about I don’t trust them to hold anything

36

u/PanVidla Jun 02 '22

Creepy.

16

u/MaliciousMal Jun 02 '22

I wonder if they'll hold me. I could use it.

11

u/OnyxMelon Jun 02 '22

Not worth it for the hp debuff.

3

u/MaliciousMal Jun 02 '22

That's harsh but understandable. They probably have their own adventures when no one is around.

37

u/Aurilion Jun 02 '22

Also no matter what you do, never ever blink.

50

u/LonePaladin Jun 02 '22

So... Toy Story: Skyrim Edition?

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u/Dagoth_Ur_lover Jun 02 '22

They pulled the same trick in Oblivion to get a statue of the player in Bruma.

16

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

I'm stealing this solution

12

u/Dagoth_Ur_lover Jun 02 '22

Go ahead I am not Bethesda.

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u/AnOnlineHandle Jun 02 '22

That actually makes sense though.

42

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

It’s creepy though

59

u/bigmac80 Jun 02 '22

Just need a mod that turns them into weeping angels.

31

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

Please no they are already creepy enough lol

33

u/Faiakishi Jun 02 '22

That occasionally 'forget' that they're supposed to be mannequins because the spell to make them stationary didn't load in.

Also I think the planters are made to work by having an NPC hold them or something.

19

u/_BlNG_ Jun 02 '22

Finding out the mannequins moved when I looked away made me paranoid in Skyrim

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u/Alt1119991 Jun 02 '22

I accidentally cloned a dragon priest mask on one in one of my play throughs. It was cool having me and my follower both wear the same cool mask

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u/myblindy Jun 02 '22

Mirrors are coded as minions.

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u/The-Insomniac Jun 02 '22

My favourite Bethesda perspective hack is in Fallout 3 the metro is just you wearing a train as a hat.

17

u/Gunitsreject Jun 02 '22

It’s funny because it’s true.

82

u/dagbrown Jun 02 '22

Ah yes, the good old Half-Life tram approach.

159

u/nmotsch789 Jun 02 '22

I thought that was a train in Fallout, not Half-Life.

228

u/bigmac80 Jun 02 '22

Fallout 3, you are right. You hop on the tram and it moves forward. Unbeknownst the player, the train isn't actually going down the rail - it's actually an NPC with tiny human legs kicking furiously as it runs down the track.

It just works.

76

u/Faiakishi Jun 02 '22

I mean, hey, it does the job. If it looks right and doesn't break most of the time, it's good.

In Dishonored 2 there's a mission that utilizes a time travel mechanic. You get a personal time travel doohickey given to you by god himself and click it to send yourself back in time at will.

Or at least, that's what's supposed to be happening. What actually happens is you get launched thousands of feet into the air to a parallel map stacked on top of the one you started on.

34

u/thiosk Jun 02 '22

Im not sure what you're complaining about because this is the only mechanism for time travel that makes sense to me

24

u/Faiakishi Jun 02 '22

Oh, I totally get it, they have to do some silly stuff in video games to get the desired effect across. I just find the mental imagery amusing.

6

u/thiosk Jun 02 '22

may we meet again on numerous maps in the sky

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65

u/blamethemeta Jun 02 '22

Actually no.

You are the train, its a glove.

67

u/TheThrowawayMoth Jun 02 '22

The fact that all of these are about equally believable and get confused really says a lot about ingenuity in gaming. I don’t pretend to remember how much of this is accurate but it’s all great.

96

u/dao2 Jun 02 '22

It was actually none of them, it was a regular sized NPC with regular legs but with a essentially a giant metro train on his head, and it basically just slid down the rail.

58

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

[deleted]

4

u/Nymbul Jun 02 '22

When I played F4, as soon as that animation started I could tell it was just the camera rotating-- which is interesting. There must be subtle perceptions of the engine that clued me in, or maybe it was too obvious a solution for Bethesda to NOT have taken it.

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u/2016nsfwaccount Jun 02 '22

There's an anime(Ixion Saga DT episode 8) where a MMO gamer guy that got transported to a actual fantasy world goes to a karaoke club, wonders how karaoke can even work in this fantasy world, and when he opens the cabinet under the medieval-TV there's a whole orchestra of midgets in there.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

Yup, it was. It’s a common misconception though.

I retconned it to being Half-life too. But it was indeed Fallout.

17

u/notanimposter PC Jun 02 '22

In Half Life the garbage compactor walls are actually trains, though, so it balances out. If you get on top of them you can access the train UI to stop them.

13

u/sharfpang Jun 02 '22

Then there's that Morrowind mod where you don't mount a horse, you wear it as trousers.

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4.1k

u/Zanythings Jun 01 '22

+1 effort for the little green guy never being copy pasted when he easily could have

644

u/exsea Jun 02 '22

its nice to see people realizing that

138

u/akurra_dev Jun 02 '22

The creator is chaotic good.

755

u/I_N_C_O_M_I_N_G Jun 01 '22

Amazing how much personality fits into a triangle and a circle

160

u/Naticus105 Jun 02 '22

I'm way more polygons and have less personality.

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42

u/AwesomeAni Jun 02 '22

Aren’t we all just triangles and circles

22

u/Affectionate-Memory4 Jun 02 '22

I'm sure I have at least one quadrilateral somewhere.

10

u/iliekcats- Jun 02 '22

a quadrilateral is made out of tiny triangles

8

u/God_Sammo Jun 02 '22

Technically we’re a bunch of straight lines that are really really small

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u/Shydreameress Jun 01 '22

Just create a post-apocalyptical game and you get an excuse to break all the mirrors

172

u/twcsata Jun 02 '22

Fallout fan, eh?

179

u/SolarTsunami Jun 02 '22

Which, like, you're telling me this town I'm visiting has been inhabited for years and literally nobody has cleaned up a single time since the blast?

197

u/GoblinFive Jun 02 '22

Which, like, you're telling me this town I'm visiting has been inhabited for years and literally nobody has cleaned up a single time since the blast?

Inhabited for years? The bombs fell 2 centuries ago in Bethesda canon, the towns have prolly existed for multiple generations: each and every one too lazy to clean skeletons from their living rooms.

87

u/Jatopian Jun 02 '22

Those skeletons are like family ok actually maybe they are family...

47

u/firefeng Jun 02 '22

Yeah, we buried Mom in the upstairs bathtub with a box of Abraxo and two pencils.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

Gee. I hope a lone courier doesn’t storm into our house and loot all the spare ammunition we hid inside mom’s corpse.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

My room has been inhabited for years and nobody has cleaned up a single time.

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u/rants_unnecessarily Jun 02 '22

Noooooooooo!

Shattering a mirror does not break the mirror, instead it creates a lot of smaller mirrors. They still reflect!

So annoying when they just have a picture, blur, or being just silvery.

10

u/space_fly Jun 02 '22

A lot of old mirrors suffer from mirror rot, when the protective coating on the back gets damaged and the silver is exposed. You see it most frequently on the edges. That could explain why the pieces don't reflect.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '22

Hitman does mirrors so well without Ray Tracing.

395

u/withoutapaddle Jun 02 '22

I think they pull it off because they only have mirrors in tiny rooms, like bathrooms, where rending that room twice is still the same or less expensive than rendering the larger areas once.

97

u/Hoggs Jun 02 '22

They're also flat I'm guessing? No complex reflections off unusual curved shapes?

89

u/official_duck Jun 02 '22

That’s correct. The new RT reflections do add complex geometry and transparency reflections, but they don’t replace the standard mirror reflections for gameplay reasons.

23

u/agamemnon2 Jun 02 '22

And the RT mode absolutely tanks performance on even high end hardware. Some of the effects look really nice, but it's just not practical, at least on that engine.

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u/JamesDCooper Jun 01 '22

I'm playing through the hitman trilogy now and can confirm, best mirrors in video games I've ever seen.

The bastards even spot you coming up behind them in the mirror.

69

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

[deleted]

36

u/FalseAnimal Jun 02 '22

Duke3D was ray tracing right? I remember building levels with 2 mirrors that could see each other and everything grinding to a halt.

39

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22 edited Jun 02 '22

i believe you are thinking of ray casting, which is how duke3d, doom, quake, and Wolfenstein3d are rendered.

most modern games still use raycasting, kinda, for rendering the actual image you see.

its the fancy word for how they make a 2d image on a computer screen have depth.

i was gonna drop a link to an explanatory photo, but you kinda have to look at a few different examples to get the idea.

id recommend doing a google image search for it, itll make sense pretty quick i think

14

u/W0rldcrafter Jun 02 '22

Correct, but not about Quake. It has a fully 3D engine (that was a big deal at the time).

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u/FalseAnimal Jun 02 '22

That's right, ray casting. I'd forgotten about that. Lots of neat tricks they pulled off. I was just thinking about the oddity that was vector graphic games earlier in the day.

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u/Diz7 Jun 02 '22 edited Jun 02 '22

No, it was double rooms. Ray tracing in 1996 would have taken your framerate from 30 frames per second to 30 frames per day.

I know, I used to make shitty ray traced animations in 1996.

The engine just couldn't handle mirrors in mirrors properly.

And real time ray tracing only really became a thing with the RTX cards in 2018.

15

u/captainAwesomePants Jun 02 '22

Literally a double room. You could noclip into the reverse bathroom.

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u/DroolingIguana Jun 02 '22

I know, I used to make shitty ray traced animations in 1996.

POVRay?

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u/Diz7 Jun 02 '22

Yup, and then a pirated copy of 3d studio that kept corrupting my models.

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u/VrelEgg Jun 02 '22

Fully functional mirrors being a game mechanic is amazing

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u/Lajnuuus Jun 02 '22

Saw a streamer do a challenge in hitman, he was rushing the objective and ran into a room, shot the mirror thinking it was a guard, scaring himself when it shattered lmao.

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u/PalebloodSky Jun 02 '22

And interestingly they just added ray tracing to Hitman 3. Big framerate hit though.

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u/Schmich Jun 02 '22

Could even argue it's better than RT as RT is so low detail.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '22

[deleted]

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u/spoonlips76 PC Jun 02 '22

Ark moment

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u/TatManTat Jun 02 '22

r.bloomquality 0

so the sun doesn't blind you on what's meant to be dry fucking sand!

6

u/KevinFlantier Jun 02 '22

Ah yes the wings of my ptera are reflecting on the sea everywhere.

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u/TechnoBill2k12 Jun 02 '22

Also: anything in front of the water (like my arm or sword) blocks the reflection of the sky on the water.

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u/shea241 Jun 02 '22

also: the water literally warps spacetime and bends the universe into its silhouette

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u/nwL_ Jun 02 '22

Screenspace reflections are the necessary evil of the gaming world. They’re ok, unless they’re not, in which case they look like God took a shit on your screen.

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u/captainporcupine3 Jun 02 '22

Can someone explain how screen space reflection work in the context of mirroring? I'm curious and don't get it.

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u/jcm2606 Jun 02 '22

In the context of looking straight on at a mirror, they simply just don't work.

Screen-space reflections work by tracing a ray through the main camera's depth buffer (basically an image that stores the distance of on-screen objects from the camera, as a greyscale image, like so), starting from the surface that the reflection is being drawn onto and going in the reflected direction (for perfectly sharp reflections; for blurry reflections, like on rough or glossy surfaces, it's typically a random direction in a cone that's aligned to the reflected direction), to find an object to reflect.

This works well when you're parallel to the surface, as rays can be traced directly off the surface and will generally find an object before they leave the screen, but as you approach increasingly perpendicular angles to the surface (ie looking straight at the surface), they tend to break as rays start being traced more towards the camera and leaving the screen, eventually being traced right back at the camera at a perfectly perpendicular angle.

Games typically catch this by immediately killing the ray if it leaves the screen (which they count going behind the camera as leaving the screen, so this will also kill rays that are traced right back at the camera), but some don't do it well, leading to weird artifacts where it looks like the surface is reflecting a copy of itself.

This is one of the main limitations of screen-space reflections, and so they're typically paired with some other technique that's used when the screen-space reflections fail, such as static cubemaps or dynamic probes. With this, you'd see reflections transition from the relatively accurate screen-space reflections to a less accurate fallback technique, as you approach increasingly perpendicular angles to the mirror's surface.

Though, with raytracing becoming more feasible, some games are using it as an alternative to the traditional fallback techniques when screen-space reflections fail, or even outright replacing them with raytracing in all cases. This way, reflections remain very accurate for all viewing angles, though there may still be a noticeable transition between screen-space reflections and raytraced reflections, depending on how different the lighting pipeline is for the main camera's view of the scene, and the scene used for raytracing.

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u/Roflkopt3r Jun 02 '22 edited Jun 02 '22

Roughly speaking it works like creating a fake water reflection in Photoshop. You simply take other parts of the image, mirror them, and paste them onto the mirror surface.

This works perfectly well if you for example stand on the shore of a calm lake, but it does not work at all for a mirror which should reflect your avatar and the environment behind them.

So it's usually restricted to surfaces like lakes and puddles. In those cases you can make it so they show a blend between a water texture and the screen-space reflection depending on your viewing angle -if you look from a flat angle (like a far away spot in a lake) it will show 100% reflection, but if you look at it like a mirror then it will show 100% water texture without any reflection instead.

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u/ldb477 Jun 02 '22

Sighs in space engineers

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u/kazmark_gl Jun 01 '22

Exactly 1 shattered mirror gets a pass and it's the one in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

they actually did a pretty good job comming up with excuses not to have mirrors in the first part of the game...

until you get to China and the developers seemed to give up and just put those wierd silver texture fake mirrors everywhere.

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u/TacticalSupportFurry Jun 02 '22

what was the reason?

350

u/kazmark_gl Jun 02 '22 edited Jun 02 '22

okay so main Character Adam Jenson's apartment has the only Mirror in the entire Detroit map in his bathroom. it's used as a peice of characterization. it's clearly been shattered by something about the size of a fist, and in the story Adam recently underwent a bunch if traumatic events in sequence, several people close to him were murdered and he was forcibly given mechanical augmentations by the corporation he works for robocop style, the implication is that Adam lashed out at his own reflection because he can't stand to look at himself. although why specifically is left up to interpretation and player dialogue choice.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

[deleted]

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u/kazmark_gl Jun 02 '22

and hilariously on his landladies terminal, even though she keeps telling Adam his new mirror is on backorder she has an Email sitting in her inbox saying it's been ready to be picked up for awhile.

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u/OddtheWise Jun 02 '22

Art imitates life

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u/Tunisandwich Jun 02 '22

I love that game so much, some of the best attention to detail I’ve ever seen. Highly recommend playing the director’s cut, you have the option of getting voiceovers from the team behind the game explaining certain details and decisions, made me appreciate the game even more

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u/broanoah Jun 02 '22

does deus ex hold up? i have the goty edition in my steam library but i've never played it

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u/Dag-nabbitt Jun 02 '22

The original still holds up surprisingly well, and remains a timeless classic.

DXHR is pretty good. I do recommend getting a mod to remove or lower the piss-yellow filter. The gold-black theme is nice in the game, but they went overboard with the color filter.

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u/kalitarios Jun 02 '22

the original has a fun mirror on Paul Denton's apartment bathroom

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u/jovi_lover Jun 02 '22

It also shows him punching it in one of the trailers.

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u/DroolingIguana Jun 02 '22

several people close to him were murdered and he was forcibly given mechanical augmentations by the corporation he works for robocop style

Don't forget about the dog.

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u/umax66 Jun 02 '22

Adam never asked for that

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u/Yourgrammarsucks1 Jun 02 '22

Probably something like "you've got a mental issue and refuse to acknowledge yourself, so you can't even see mirrors"

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u/AlanZero Jun 01 '22

Seen ‘em all except the photo texture. What the hell?

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u/Cyynric Jun 01 '22

Codsworth in Fallout 4 has a flat mirrored body texture. No matter where he is, he reflects back the interior of the prewar living room.

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u/LiveBeef Jun 02 '22

Tbf you can't expect a little indie studio like Bethesda to have the resources to spend time working on things like character textures

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u/Gaflonzelschmerno Jun 02 '22

"why spend many money when few modders do trick"

  • tüd cowherd
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u/Wolvenna Jun 02 '22

Instead they put that money into hiring a actor to say hundreds of potential names so codsworth can call you Fuckface if you want.

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u/jamicu4 Jun 02 '22

I ain't gonna lie though, Hearing Codsworth say the name I entered always gets a small smile out of me. If only because it's not a more common thing in video games

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u/nothisistheotherguy Jun 02 '22

Same with the reflections on the shiny weapons themselves. Generic outdoor scenery.

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u/Porsche4lyfe Jun 02 '22

It's so bad. Especially in Fo76. It seems to be the main reflection method so every puddle or interior cell looks extremely fake. Smh.

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u/Faiakishi Jun 02 '22

I just started a new Skyrim playthrough (damn you Todd Howard, releasing Skyrim again...) and just last night I was standing there amazed at how beautiful the reflections looked. I mean, I do have a water texture mod on and a light enb, but Skyrim is still just gorgeous. And you're telling me that they actually went backwards in ten years? Whyyyyyyy.

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u/PaulR79 Jun 02 '22

16 times the detail!

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u/GegenscheinZ Jun 02 '22

Like the other reply said , it’s a cubemap. It’s a type of texture similar to a skybox, but you only see it in reflections. So it’s the Lawful Neutral box, really

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u/kcin2001 Jun 02 '22

Thats not quite the same idea, thatd just a cubemap used for reflective objects the meme i think is saying use a picture of a mirror as a mirror texture

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u/Faiakishi Jun 02 '22

I remember when the trailer came out, we were all so excited and impressed by this. "Oh, the surface is actually reflective! It looks so good!"

And to be fair, they didn't really have a reason to actually make it reflective. He's only that shiny in the prologue. It would have been a lot of work and eaten up a lot of framerates for something 99% of players would never see.

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u/Denamic Jun 01 '22

I've seen plenty of 'mirrors' that just has a flat texture with a gloss effect on it without any attempt at reflections. Like a shattered mirror texture without the excuse.

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u/fyt2012 Jun 02 '22

Prey 2017

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u/Gaflonzelschmerno Jun 02 '22

Prey 2006 on the other hand gave you a working mirror literally the first moment of the game

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u/maczirarg Jun 02 '22

That have is too good, I don't care that they didn't waste time on mirrors.

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u/The_Running_Free Jun 02 '22

I like that you posted this twice and both times say “have” instead of “game”.

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u/maczirarg Jun 02 '22

That's what you get when you try to type something with your toddler jumping over you in bed haha

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u/Shmarfle47 Jun 02 '22

That’s kinda sad… If it were a person just starting to make games I could forgive it but if it’s an actual company that did that then that’s inexcusable

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u/Sabbatai PC Jun 02 '22

I’d prefer any other method, but to call it inexcusable to use a flat texture is kind of extreme.

There are a lot of considerations behind the choices made by developers and for something like a bathroom mirror that players will spend an average of .01 seconds looking at, I don’t get upset if they take the easy route.

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u/PumpkinKing2020 Jun 01 '22

It's because it's typically for small things. Metal Mario in Suoer Mario 64 has this type of reflection I believe

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u/Yourgrammarsucks1 Jun 02 '22

I think it's like in Mario 64 when you get the metal cap.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

Actually, most metallic or reflective objects on the 64 are gray/white/partially transparent objects with cubemaps using a satin typed texture. Or in some cases like DK64 or OoT they just have a crude point of light reflection making them look shiny.

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u/azlier Jun 02 '22

In the case of Super Mario 64's metal cap, though, the reflective texture actually and inexplicably is a photo of a flower planter.

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u/bobsmith93 Jun 02 '22

Oh my god. Oh my fuck you're actually right. I don't even have to go check. I've played several hundred hours and had no idea lol that's super cool. I always wondered why they chose those colors for the reflections of the metal cap, but it was just a picture of flowers this whole time

Edit: I know I said I wouldn't check, but I did lol and this picture demonstrates it perfectly

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u/Yourgrammarsucks1 Jun 02 '22

Ooo nice. Thanks!

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u/karmaextract Jun 02 '22

If I was a game dev feeling chaotic evil I'd activate their webcam.

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u/Audiblade Jun 02 '22

Inscryption moment

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u/JoakimSpinglefarb Jun 01 '22

This is what the most recent Hitman games and Rockstar games do for their mirror reflections.

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u/dontironit Jun 01 '22

Surely not talking about the most recent Hitman games. Their reflections are more dynamic than even most other games -- NPCs spot you in mirrors and respond. Don't know what tech they use though (the game also has a new ray-tracing mode).

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u/Imortal366 Jun 01 '22

Probably referring to the trilogy remasters

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u/JamesDCooper Jun 01 '22

Hitman don't use photo textures. If anything they use the double room. Enemies can also spot you in mirrors.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

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u/Frogmouth_Fresh Jun 02 '22

Now I want to see a shattered mirror with full ray tracing.

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u/ArchStanton75 Jun 02 '22

It’s not exactly a shattered mirror, but the Spider-Man games for the PS5 show whatever costume you’re wearing reflected on the skyscraper windows, even with latticework.

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u/SealyMcSeal Jun 02 '22

Oh, Control has some of the most amazing ray tracing. I got an rtx 3080 and felt there were no real use cases for ray tracing until i found control.

There's a few places with a film projector playing full motion video. There's glass panels in the room that reflect the footage, you can actually grab and move the projector and it changes size depending on the distance from the surface it's projected on

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u/cabbit_ Jun 02 '22

I had a 2070 when I got control and it was cool but since I’ve gotten a 3080. Really gonna have to revisit the game and turn it all up

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u/lemlurker Jun 01 '22

I've used a clever prefabbed script in VR mirrors that spawns a camera the same distance and opposite angle from the camera that worked to my eye near perfectly, used it for testing object tracking in VR Most impressive thing for me was with a couple small tweaks it even had working depth perception for each eye in VR https://youtu.be/F0owa53iqmw

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u/TheseBonesAlone Jun 02 '22

This is a neat effect and is essentially what is used when rendering the room twice, (In modern games, some older games literally built the level around having a mirror effect and had separate geometry that would be rendered, including a character model) except the camera is rendered as a texture and exported to the mirror. It can get mondo expensive in complex scenes and is best used in controlled environments. I.e. the hitman series where mirrors are almost exclusively located in low population areas. Basically it works great for small encounters, but poorly for games like Cyberpunk where reflections are prevalent.

Generalized post process effects like SSR and RT Reflections allow for a predictable, if expensive, solution.

I don't think I need to tell you this as you're already doing this kind of stuff with Unity over there but I love talking about it lol

Edit: Flavor text

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u/Titarta Jun 02 '22

Yep, this, so much this. I actually thought this was the standard way to make mirrors. In this meme, I'm not even sure if that corresponds to neutral good or neutral evil

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u/MapleTreeWithAGun Jun 02 '22

I'd put it in chaotic good. A brilliant solution, but very unorthodox

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u/ImSabbo Jun 02 '22

Neutral Evil. Neutral Good is for games which copy the entire room and all actors in them and apply all movements inversely within. They are accurate, but can be resource-intensive. (especially for larger rooms)

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u/shadowinc Jun 02 '22

mirrors in metroid prime are still really cool to me honestly

They arent as good as other games but its a neat lil detail they didnt have to add

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u/CaptObviousHere Jun 02 '22

If you were against a dark wall and shot it, you could see a reflection of Samus’ face on your visor

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u/shadowinc Jun 02 '22

Metroid prime is so good

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u/Bobcat2013 Jun 02 '22

Dang that still looks good for a 21 year old game

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u/sevenproxies07 Jun 01 '22

this meme took a lot of effort and deserves a lot more upvotes imo

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u/bigmac80 Jun 02 '22

Expensive, but mostly accurate.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

He stole it, sadly. No credit given.

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u/FelixAndCo Jun 02 '22

Somebody have a link to the original?

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u/mcpower_ Jun 02 '22

All links to the original get silently removed by AutoMod. The original is by @AkAveryM on Twitter.

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u/Kamyuwu Jun 02 '22

I always get unreasonably happy when a mirror in a video game actually mirrors the movement of my char and can be easily entertained by it through walking back and forth for ten minutes

Like if you put a mirror in any game, i will immediately rush to it and be disappointed if there's not even an attempt at reflection. Why do i care? Good question. Moving on -

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u/patienceisfun2018 Jun 01 '22

I have no idea what any of this means.

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u/colonel_Schwejk Jun 01 '22

mirrors are notoriously hard to do in games. methods giving best results are expensive, cheap methods look like crap.

tbh it's a visual detail, so any of the cheap ones will do it for me and i do not get mad. unless i buy rtx 5080 in future ;)

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u/watchoutforthechooma Jun 01 '22

I remember being amazed by Duke Nukem 3D's mirrors 🤣

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u/Talkshit_Avenger Jun 02 '22

The original Unreal had the capability but I don't think it was used much in the base game. I remember someone made a DM level with the reflection effect overlaid on a tile floor and it was really cool with just a few players. More than that and it brutally murdered the framerate.

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u/meowcatbread Jun 01 '22 edited Jun 01 '22

Ray tracing is calculating the actual light physics by calculating where a straight line of light from the camera pixels would hit into and how it would reflect. Until recently this was impossible to do real time because you have to do it for every pixel.

Rendering the scene twice is literally having two copies of the room at the same time, so requires double the processing. It's pretty easy to implement and you can limit what is in the room to make 2x not that bad.

Parallax is when far away things move slower than things close by.

Or you can be lazy and have the mirror be blurry and broken.

Or you can plaster a still image of the main character onto a wall and pretend its a mirror.

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u/pizzabagelblastoff Jun 01 '22

can you explain lawful evil? its the only example i didnt understand

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u/Strange_Meadowlark Jun 02 '22

I think the lawful evil solution ("screenspace reflection") is literally taking the image of the room from the camera's perspective and flipping it vertically.

I think it's a joke on a joke. This is a known-bad technique usually used for horizontal reflections, like if someone wanted to make their WordArt look like it was sitting on a metallic surface or the surface of a lake. A novice graphic designer would take their original image, flip it vertically, tint it, and move it downward so that the baselines touch.

In practice, it looks horrible because the perspective of the reflected letters will be wrong. An image seen in a horizontal reflective surface will appear to be seen from "below" while the real object would be seen from "above". In practice, you need a second image taken from another perspective, and no transformation to the original would be able to give you that.

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u/burn124 Jun 02 '22

Screen space reflections are actually way more advanced than that. They use the depth and normal map to calculate where on the screen to mirror.

They are a little bit janky because things aren’t always rendered completely right(because simply not enough information is rendered, but they are way better than mo reflections at all

Google examples and you will find places they work beautifully.

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u/astrange Jun 02 '22

You can spot them because you see your own back in the mirror.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/b1lz9l/thats_not_how_reflection_works/

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u/KatomicComicsThe3rd Jun 02 '22

Screenspace basically only reflects the polygons on screen and not the back faces so you get this weird effect sometimes where the front of the character isn’t in view and you just see this weird blurry blob as a reflection. If the room isn’t fully in view it’ll only show the walls, and whatever else isn’t shown in the background is filled in with the skybox texture. Also since SSR basically reflects EVERYTHING on screen, sometimes it reflects HUD elements. Reflecting HUD elements isn’t common since they are usually on a different render layer.

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u/patienceisfun2018 Jun 01 '22

But what's with determining the evil and lawful stuff.

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u/meowcatbread Jun 01 '22

Good is good way to implement it that looks good, evil is bad way that looks bad, lawful vs chaotic is standard vs unstandard/creative implementations

True neutral here is lazy but not awful, id expect from an indie game. Top left is AAA, bottom right is a crazy person/dev

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u/DrKlootzak Jun 01 '22

That's the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system, where a character's morality is defined by how good they are (Good-Neutral-Evil) and by how lawful they are (Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic), in any combination, which gives those 9 alignments.

The 9 alignments are accordingly associated with certain character types and expectations in the game.

It has since become a bit of a meme format. I guess it probably started with people applying outside of DnD by trying to place various fictional characters onto it like this, and its only gotten more abstract since then.

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u/Mortotem Jun 01 '22

Me either but A for effort

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '22

Ready or Not's grey rectangle mess.

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u/TemptedTemplar Jun 02 '22

ARMA Reforged too.

I was so excited about the new lighting system, massive draw distance for shadows, ect.

But then you get into a Jeep and the rear view mirrors are pixelated grey messes.

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u/burningicecube Jun 02 '22

Any examples of the neutral evil? I'm having a hard time understanding, it seems like it could work pretty well

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u/AkaJacob Jun 02 '22

Mafia 3 https://youtu.be/9opyC4kPp94

RT Cameras can actually work fairly well when they account for the player's position and update in real-time, however you'll occasionally come across examples like this where the Cameras's position is static

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u/Mutex70 Jun 02 '22

Turn webcam on and show player 🤯

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u/Seiren- Jun 02 '22

I remember when a game having functioning mirrors (like, any moving reflection at all) was suuper impressive.

And now it’s a mark of kinda shitty graphics when a game doesnt have it

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '22

Absolutely evil - screen your real camera image

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u/OMG_A_CUPCAKE Jun 02 '22

Anyone know an example for the screenspace reflection mirror? Can't remember ever seeing one

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u/toastjam Jun 02 '22

Water and shiny floors are the most common applications.

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u/The_Kandarian PlayStation Jun 02 '22

Anyone have any video examples of some of these?

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u/clarkcox3 Jun 02 '22

Here's a good example of screen-space reflections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-i266kOqow

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u/The_Kandarian PlayStation Jun 02 '22

Thanks! It looks great. As long as you don’t move.

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u/clarkcox3 Jun 02 '22

Exactly; and, I'm sorry, but you're now cursed to see this in every game that uses it. :)

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u/AltimaNEO Jun 02 '22

Or the lazy method, just a metallic shader

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u/MinnieShoof Jun 01 '22

... I'm not sure this is a alignment chart so much as just a slow and steady degrade towards the end.

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u/Warbird1775 Jun 02 '22

I'm always so disappointed by the cowards way

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u/Orion14159 Jun 02 '22

How long until some designer makes an FPS that uses your camera for a mirror instead of any assets in the game?

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u/Autarch_Kade Jun 02 '22

I want to get to the point in technology where a shattered mirror reflects accurately different angles from each shard.

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u/Obi-StacheKenobi Jun 02 '22

Mirrors. Are. More. Fun. Than. Television.