Mirrors

Developer laziness.

Any other answer is wrong.

A working mirror requires rendering everything twice, which will inevitably cause performance issues if the game is already pushing the GPU to its limits.

>>375908324
>What is render culling

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>>375907427
They do

>>375907427
Fresh Full Sail Academy graduates working on AAA titles don't know how to do it

>>375909180

yeah if that really worked he would have seen your gun in the reflection and reacted to that.

>>375908324

most games push your system to the limits because they're un-optimized.

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>>375909501
Only a very small handful of games do that.

>>375908926
What does that have to do with mirrors? The game has to render the "normal" geometry and the geometry visible in the mirror no matter what kind of culling tricks you use.

>>375909942
It's never a problem because mirrors are almost always located in small areas. Any mirror in a large area would cull everything unnecessary to achieve the desired effect. That's not even mentioning that there are multiple ways to achieve mirrors.

if EA can do it with the sims so can everyone else

>>375907427
Your toaster can barely fucking render the scene once, and you want it to do it not only twice, but also render things your camera is not looking at.

And then you go and leave a bad Steam review because the game is perfoming poorly for you.

>>375907427
waste of resources like player character bodies in FPS

>>375910417
The N64 accomplished mirrors on console hardware in 1996.

>>375907427
you can thank the weak 360 and ps3, who you can also thank for the insane fucking "norms" nowadays

>>375909571
That's the fucking point.

>>375911391
I want you to compare the graphics of the n64 to the graphics of modern day games
which ones look harder to render?

>>375907427
Because you'd have to shoehorn in a bathroom to put it in for performance reasons and practically nobody would care

>>375907427
Lazy Devs and shitty console hardware made it a norm. The lower difficulty to develop a game nowadays formed a division of mediocre developers who are unable to go the extra mile. Just look at most AAA games. Not much love and talent in these games.
I made a working mirror with the fucking Source engine in 2005 and it was not even that hard.

>copy and paste room
>???
>working mirror
Literally 2 minutes of their time, lazy fucks.

>>375909571
>LAMBERT....I....

>>375907427
It's fucking bullshit man. Having reflections, and working mirrors should be as integral to game design as physics, modeling, and the gameplay itself. PREY is one of the most recent offenders. The "gameplay video" shows Morgan looking into a mirror, but NOPE, all mirrors are sheets of brushed steel because that's what people use in the future apparently.

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>>375912489
NOMIRRORS

I can't see why making them is a performance problem, rendering some tiny room again and culling all that is not reflected can't be that hard on performance, can it?

>>375911472
OP said working mirrors. No mention of AI seeing you was made.

someone post the doom 3 one pls

>>375912581
you tell me you seem to know so much about programming

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>>375912671

>>375912581
If it worked ok 20+ years ago on a game engine from that time, there's no excuse other than lazyness. They consider it a waste of dev time because that level of immersion isn't worth the investment on all the design choices that have to work around that aspect. In otherwords, they can't cheat.

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>it's another episode of autists crying over not being able to stare at your character in a mirror for a few seconds in a game, and then crying and complaining and calling the game shit when they realize that they've had to sacrifice performance to stupid fucking mirrors.

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Ok, I want to start PvPing in Dark Souls.
How does it work exactly?

I need to be lvl 120 and just use a red eye orb, correct?
How can I invade a world where 3 people play together?
What's the best covenant? Fingers or Watchdoges?
What do I do if I have a lvl 136 char?

>>375912823
static environments are never really satisfying even if you ain't autistic

>>375912836
All you need to do is find a mirror and walk through it to reach another players world.

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>>375909571
>this is what Splinter Cell used to be

>racing game open or circuit
>reflections on hood;essentially a mirror

>small room
>no mirror

its laziness. that or they dont want to devote resources to something ...actually nah, its laziness. that room will be culled for the rest of the game anyway. no excuse not to have it.

>>375913015
Shut the fuck up Blacklist was still good

>>375907453
more like limited resources. When your fighting t get unestable 30 fps with as much lightning effects and wow factor you can't lose a bit of memory with mirrors, when is something so easy to avoid

>>375907427
Back then games were made for PC then lowered to the specs of you console of choice, everyone got the best version of the game you were capable of having. Now things are made with a sinmgular console in mind and everyone gets shat on because system parity became more important as consoles became shittier.

>>375913062
>I'm 14 Years Old: the Post

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>>375912716
>>375911391
Game engines, hardware and rendering techniques were very different 20 years ago.

On N64 for example fillrate was the biggest bottleneck, not geometry, so rendering all the geometry twice was not a major issue.

>>375907427
Games have evolved a lot since the 2000s, assets have a lot more geometry, lighting and shadows takes up more computing power, mirrors today is just simply not worth the effort, it would just unnecessarily tank performance a lot for something that's not really that worth it. It's explained to you guys for every thread that you make, why is it so difficult to understand? it's not about laziness, it's about compromise. The majority doesnt really care about looking at mirrors.

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>>375907427

>every time someone tried to new Prey demo they immediately go to the bathroom and stop at the broken mirror is disappointment
>rest of the demo is just as disappointing

>>375909501
>make every bathroom useless because overflowing the sink makes people suspicious if you linger around, so they see you in a mirror blame you

>>375913017
The reflections on a car or whatever can be done with a simple dynamic cubemap, which is much more efficient than an actual reflection.

>>375912937
He wants to play DaS3 and not DaS2.
Mirror Knight invasions may be more fun than most invasions in DaS3 but he's not playing that.

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>>375912489
>>375912545
The original(good)Version of Prey got working mirrors right in 2006. Just sad.

>>375907427
Low impact effect high resource task

>>375914531

Good? Prey? Good? You fucking idiot.

>>375914759
Most times you'd come across a mirror would be a small bathroom. It shouldn't effect game performance that much. It's just devs being lazy because they all have the mindset that no one really cares about realism or immersion to that extent. If you're gonna be a lazy dev and omit mirrors, then you may as well not even bother to design bathrooms to look like they have mirrors make them institutional style with a island full of sinks, with stalls/urinals around the walls. Don't insult my intelligence and render a mirror that looks like brushed steel, or have every single mirror in the game is smashed. Lazy devs and poor design, that's all it is.

>>375907427
A real time Mirror is a gpu heavy feature that do not escalates well with the complexity of the graphics because you're basically rendering two viewports at the same time (or more if you have more mirrors at the same time)

If you have a complex scene with a lot of shit going on,you basically have to render it twice.

That is why mirrors were usually used in small simple rooms like bathrooms for example.

Somewhere down the 7th gen developers decided that pushing the models/textures/light was more important than working mirrors and this feature was downgraded/forgotten.

Similar thing happened with interactive objects in games.most objects are static these days.

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>>375912371

>>375915310
>It shouldn't effect game performance that much.

t. someone who knows nothing about 3D rendering

It _might_ not effect performance much, depending on the game and how far it pushes the GPU. But in a modern AAA game the countless rendering passes, motion vector calculations, post processing effects and whatnot can take up such a large chunk of render time that doing all that twice is not feasible even if the mirror doesn't bump up the number of triangles on the screen too much.

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>>375914531
>(good)
>Prey

>>375914928
I was a decent game.

I forget which game it is, but I think it was the first Deus Ex that had the mirror work by making it just a window to an identical room and a model of your character that was programmed to make all of your same movements.

the original Prey was one of the best early 360 games

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>>375916162
fuck no.
Did you actually play through it?
I had to slog my way through to justify my $30 purchase.

>>375916462
I payed 1 dollars for pirate cd with prey and after playing 3-4 hours felt ripped off
only good thing about this game is interesting death mechanic. eveything else is fucking trash and waste of id tech engine.

>8 years later
>graphics are practically the same
>the only thing increased is the lack of optimization
it's just a loop de loop at this point

>>375916268

A lot of games did that but I'm pretty sure not Deus Ex. Deus Ex used Unreal Engine and I'm pretty sure that supported render to texture.

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>>375916773
>paying for pirate

>>375916773
even the death mechanic sucks. there was nothing interesting about the game. even when it threw a new weapon your way, everything felt dull.

Rate my idea.

Can you render a manually created version of the room and character behind the mirror ? Essencially just creating a copy rather than actual real time mirroring.
Looks retarded in noclip mode though.

>>375907453
fpbp

>>375917735
Yes, and many older games did this. However, everything going on in the room will have to be duplicated and mirrored. If only the player can enter the room and not much can happen inside it, this is not a problem, but implementing mirrored "dummy NPCs", particle systems and whatnot that follow whatever the real object is doing could get pretty complex.

If you were a producer, would you make your programming team spend a month writing these "dummy NPC / particle mirroring / animation mirroring / decal mirroring" systems instead of having them focus on something more important and skip the mirrors?

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>>375917242
in 00s ex-ussr minority of games got official releases.

>>375917735

Only under very specific circumstances will this work, e.g. static flat lighting, no physics objects in the scene, etc. It's not even close to being a robust solution.

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>anons ITT actually making the argument that todays generation can't achieve the technical prowess of consoles and PCs a decade ago

>>375918753
No, we're making an argument that due to modern rendering techniques working mirrors are often much more expensive (performance-wise) to implement than 10 or 20 years ago.

see
>>375916094
>>375913419

>>375918753

It's not a matter of inability, it's a matter of prioritizing your limited processing power. Most of the old cheap tricks to do reflections simply don't work with modern rendering techniques. It's a cost-benefit situation and the benefits of working bathroom mirrors in video games are practically non-existent beyond a gimmick scenario or two.

>>375918880
>>375919121
That's like arguing that shadows are a needless gimmick.Fuck you.
Shit developers who couldn't optimize a game if their life depended on it and companies who make "next-gen" consoles as cheaply as humanly possible with minimal progress are to blame.

>>375914531
I picked up Prey for £0.50 on the 360 and it's one of the best FPS I've played.

>>375920197
>Shit developers who couldn't optimize a game if their life depended on it and companies who make "next-gen" consoles as cheaply as humanly possible with minimal progress are to blame.

Oh look, it's another person who feels a position of complete and utter ignorance is the perfect place from which to make judgement calls on technical issues. That crap may work in politics but in these sorts of specialist fields people who actually do know what they are talking about will just tell you to go fuck yourself.

>>375920197
>hey guys I have an awesome idea
>there's one drawback though, we need to make our rendering logic about twice as efficient or our performance will tank
>and also we need to remove this and this post processing effect because they're too expensive to do twice within the same frame
>but it's totally worth it, the players will be blown away if they happen to visit this toilet and look at the mirror

>>375920197
>I don't know what I'm talking about: The Post.

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>mirrors work, and they reveal hidden characters and levels

>>375920197
Shadows are not that expensive and there are many tricks to make it even cheaper so your comparison is not good.

Reflection don't escalate well with graphics which means more complex games become smaller is the cost/benefit of implementing a real time mirror.that is why old games had it and new games don't.

Its not just the "bad devs" that dropped mirrors.everybody did basically

>>375920708
Yeah nah.
if western programmers were competent their work wouldn't get outsourced to Ukraine or India

>>375917735
Why would you do this if a shader surface can do this with a single click and also adjust rendering resolution and graphic settings of the mirrror?
Games like GTA for example do this, it's a very efficient method which is very scalabe to hardware.

I can only guess devs just don't care or are too lazy to fully model and animate the player character, because it's easy as shit to do on the most common game engines.

>>375921209
What kind of shader are you talking about? Or do you simply mean rendering the scene into a texture?

>>375921063

Development is outsourced to places like India and the Ukraine not because they are so much more talented but because they work for significantly less.

As someone who has actually had to personally deal with outsourcing to Indian developers they are generally very far from being competent, much less better.

>>375921063
Outsourcing is much more to do with how much companies can get out of workers for as little amount of money, not because they are better.

>>375921063
you literally know nothing about game development, congratulations on being fucking ignorant and flaunting it

>>375921442
>>375921601
>>375921621
They're cheaper and on the same proficiency level, therefore better.
Try to git gud so Pajeet and Mykola stop "stealing" your jobs. (^:
Or don't

>>375921436
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnGi6pEVc3I

>>375921738
Do you honestly think you're talking to employees from Arkane? How fucking thick are you man.

Also you need to provide evidence if you want to start making more uninformed claims

>>375921738
>They're cheaper and on the same proficiency level, therefore better.
Say that to SFV.

>>375921938
Nah I think I'm talking to entitled college grands who want to earn as much money without doing any work, and as long as the code is executed before sun goes out it's ok.

https://pastebin.com/cu9gDj5Z

>>375922058
>dat projection
>still no evidence

I accept your concession

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>>375907427
Life is Strange has a lot of mirrors. It even has a puzzle that involve a mirror.

>>375921768
Ok, so basically something along the lines of
http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/MirrorReflection4

I.e. simply a second camera that renders the game into a texture. That's the easy part, but it requires the rendering logic to only utilize a portion of the GPU's capabilities when there are no mirrors around.

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Working mirrors were never actually working mirrors.
Rendering an actual mirror, as in it actually reflects light sources too, is fucking ridiculous to pull off.
Dont believe me? Download blender or a free version of maya, load in any free demo scene, And just drop a mirror in to it.
It isnt hard. Get a rectangle, change the shader or whatever its called in your package to a material with reflection, and then hit the render button.
Look what it does to your render times.
Most of the older tech with amazing working mirrors werent actually working mirrors. They would use clever little tricks, like making the mirror actually a tv screen showing a remote room that copies and is binded to the original room, so that anything that happens in room A happens in B.
Or something similar, like in pic related.
That being said, theres no real reason why modern games shouldnt be able to pull off the same tricks these days.

>>375916814
>>8 years later
>>graphics are practically the same
wow, i never knew blind people posted on /v/

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>>375924259
>Rendering an actual mirror, as in it actually reflects light sources too, is fucking ridiculous to pull off

Half Life 1 engine can pull that off.
It's smoke and mirrors but still.

Realtime ray tracing when?

>>375919121
>It's not a matter of inability, it's a matter of prioritizing your limited processing power
Which is weird considering most games today don't really look all that impressive.

>>375924259
Why do retards like you talk about shit they know nothing about? Fucking rendering quality is not the same, retard. Of fucking course the render times increase big time you mongoloid, you're dealing with orders of magnitude higher quality compared to real time videogames.

Also you're looking at old as fuck games that didn't even have normalmaps, why the fuck would that apply to anything newer? You think fucking Hitman >>375909180 has a second room too?

>>375924456
Thats the point i made though.
Its not an actual working mirror. Its the impression or illusion of one.
I cant remember half lifes mirror method of the top of my head, but i think their mirrors were actually portals going the same way out.
The reason Tthe light reflection worked was because it would treat the light as an object going in to it and then out at the exit, which is right back at you or something like that.
They mentioned it in one of portal 1' little developer bubbles.

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>>375922228
It also looks like an N64 game, so no surprise. Next time mention Hitman (tm) (2016) when talking about working mirrors, that game looks great.

Doesn't mean they weren't tricky cunts, pic related.

>>375924895
>Its not an actual working mirror. Its the impression or illusion of one.
No fucking shit, it's in a goddamn videogame of course it isn't real. You think raytracing makes mirrors any more "real"?

>>375925046
The difference between the "working" mirror and a fake "mirror room" is that you won't be able to reproduce dynamic stuff like physics, and screenspace effects are going to be fucked up. But if the "working mirror" is just an image, then it's not a problem.

New Prey has that looking glass tech that might be used in kind of the same way, i'm not sure why did not do that for the bathroom mirrors.

>>375925282
No game after the 90s uses the mirror room trick, there are a tonne of better, less expensive ways to do it. The mirror room more than doubles the required rendering power since you are rendering an entire extra room plus anything that's in it (more than doubles because chances are you're close to the mirror, so the mirror room is rendering a lot more of the room you're in).

>>375925282
>The difference between the "working" mirror and a fake "mirror room" is that you won't be able to reproduce dynamic stuff like physics

But it uses a shader which renders the same scene from a different perspective, which does include dynamic light, physics, decals and all that stuff.

>>375907427
Mirrors are more fun than television

>>375916162
>>375916462
It was a good game, even introduced me to coast to coast am

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>people actually give a shit about this kind of stuff

You're the reason AAA devs put so much thought into graphics and so little thought into gameplay and performance.

Literally nobody gives a shit about working mirrors, and generally they look very shit anyway, 90% of mirror webms I see posted just have a really poorly animated model sort of matching the players movements, but not completely.

>>375926152
>90% of mirror webms I see posted just have a really poorly animated model sort of matching the players movements, but not completely.

First person and third person viewmodels are two separate things, mongoloid.

>>375926254
Exactly. Why draw attention to the differences when it looks like shit?

>>375925596
>The mirror room more than doubles the required rendering power since you are rendering an entire extra room plus anything that's in it

Could you give examples of techniques that don't require rendering an extra room? The "standard" way of using a second camera that renders the mirror image on a texture also requires rendering everything twice.

Also, I take it you haven't heard of frustum or occlusion culling. The stuff that isn't visible in the actual room or through the mirror "viewport" don't necessarily need to be rendered.

>>375926152
>AAA devs put thought into graphics/immersion

You're full of shit. Devs cut corners all the time now, to push out an unpolished product that they pass off as a revolutionary next gen experience, when it's the same lazy practices and rehashed ideas as everyone else, because "it's the norm", and "everyone gets away with it", so nothing improves. If lighting, physics, and shadows are important in this day and age, so should be proper reflections on surfaces, and mirrors. The laziness is just the standard, because apologists like you don't care.

>>375926706
Any suggestions on an effective way to render mirrors?

t. a game developer

>>375926706
>game development is notoriously one of the most demanding development positions
>HURR DURR GAME DEVS ARE ALL LAZY!

You're an idiot. It retards like you that are driving up development costs with your MUH GRAPHCIS AT THE EXPENSE OF EVERYTHING ELSE! demands that are the very reason why shit like testing and polishing is so lackluster these days. Thanks, cancer.

>>375927004
Render everything to a damned texture! Who cares if it would be more taxing on the gpu, fucking optimize your game to where it doesn't require a $5,000 machine to run, and make sure it fits within the processing budget. Games did it in the past with their hardware constraints, and it could be done now. Yeah we have more polys, higher res textures, physics, and shaders/particle effects, but the hardware has improved as well! It's possible! And it's the current hardware constraints of shit consoles, and lazy development that are the only real excuses the tech is never touched anymore.

>>375926254
That's their point. 9 times out of 10 the model seen in the mirror is animated like shit.

>>375927867
But at least they put it in there. I would be happy with that way more than NOMIRRORS.

>>375920953
>it is just another mario who copies everything you do

>>375927976
I'd much rather effort be put elsewhere rather than on something that more often than not just turns out looking bad. The novelty of seeing yourself in the mirror in a game wears off almost immediately.

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>>375926706
You're a fucking maniac, dude. How can you possibly think reflections come anywhere close in terms of importance to lighting? Lighting completely sets the style and mood of the game world, and can completely alter the aesthetics of a level or room.

And no, I don't think every game needs advanced lighting or dynamic shadows for every object. Devs can cut corners anywhere as long as they do it well. Compare the first two Dark Souls games, DS2 clearly has a more advanced lighting system in place, but it looks like total shit compared to DS1 because it was implemented poorly. The same goes for everything, better tech =/= better looking game.

RE7 is a game that has great lighting, but no working mirrors, it reflects light sources, but that's it. You think if you looked into a mirror and could see an uncanny valley character model gawking back at you, that would improve immersion as opposed to simply a light on a black background?

>>375927737
We have a "rendering budget" - how many milliseconds rendering a frame can take. And obviously we want to get as much out of that limited budget as possible.

A mirror is very easy to implement and _can_ run without performance issues, but spending a large chunk of rendertime on a mirror inevitably means that we have to make compromises somewhere else. Let's say rendering the mirror takes 30% of the frametime - that means I have ~5 milliseconds less to spend on rendering the rest of the scene, and I'd much rather use those 5 milliseconds on improving the visuals (higher quality lighting, textures, post processing, whatever) instead of a mirror.

>>375908324
This is such BS, if a game has a camera system all you have to do is flip the camera and output on a pane of glass to give the illusion of a mirror

The real reason is a lot of games don't render the player character, like the newer dues ex games where his animations are shitty in third person

>>375928241
>I'd much rather effort be put elsewhere rather than on something that more often than not just turns out looking bad.
Yeah, maybe put some effort to not adding nonfunctional mirror at all because it also looks bad.

ITT: Retards don't know how game development works

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>>375914531
>(good)
>literally unplayable

>>375928607
Then, when the decision is made to omit mirrors, the devs shouldn't even attempt to feature them in their games, the biggest offender of recent is PREY. It has multiple bathrooms littered with sinks and mirrors, and their answer is to make them look like sheets of brushed steel. A persons intelligence shouldn't be insulted to that degree. Fucking have the mirrors scratched up, smashed up, or just don't have them at all, don't design a room full of mirrors, and then tell me, "oh btw we aren't doing mirrors so I'm gonna replace all these textures with what appears to be a sheet of stainless steel, because that makes sense, LOL".

>>375928958
Other aspects are much more important than a mirror you'll look at maybe once or twice.

>>375928958
Yeah, exactly.

>>375925000
>Obviously hasn't played life is strange
Hey nice trips tho

>>375928787
>This is such BS, if a game has a camera system all you have to do is flip the camera and output on a pane of glass to give the illusion of a mirror

You do know that involves rendering a separate scene, right? You render what the mirror "sees" to texture and place it in the scene and then you render what the player sees. Games are already struggling to maintain 30fps as it is. There's a reason why games that actually do have working mirror will only ever use them in places that have a relatively light rendering cost, e.g. small bathrooms with not much detail, etc. You're probably not going to be seeing games use mirrors in locations with lots of geometry, character models, visual effects, etc. going on any time soon even if they do support them.

>>375928607
>>375927737
cont

>Games did it in the past with their hardware constraints, and it could be done now. Yeah we have more polys, higher res textures, physics, and shaders/particle effects, but the hardware has improved as well!

The hardware has improved, but rendering techniques have also changed a lot in the last decade. The bottlenecks in 3D rendering are different nowadays (mainly the number of draw calls, to some extent the number of vertices), and they happen to be things that become almost twice as worse when rendering a mirror. And if we want lighting to behave even in a remotely correct way when being reflected from the window, that opens an entirely new can of worms.

>>375928787
>This is such BS, if a game has a camera system all you have to do is flip the camera and output on a pane of glass to give the illusion of a mirror

You do realize that "outputting on a pane of glass" means that the game has to be rendered again from the perspective of the flipped camera?

>>375929182
Agreed

>>375929364
When a company devises a game engine, it should always be something that's part of it. It doesn't matter how insignificant it seems. If a game calls for a room to feature a mirror, that mirror should function as a mirror was intended to. When you replace a mirror in a game with a shiny texture, you're breaking immersion. Gamers are smarter than that. If you want to feature mirrors, but don't want to use the games budget to utilize them, then you should at least have the decency of making a believable excuse as to why they don't function. Have them scratched up, beyond use, or have them smashed, covered with blood/paint. Anything. Or just don't utilize them at all. It's a pet peeve that many gamers share.

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>>375928787
>all you have to do is flip the camera and output on a pane of glass to give the illusion of a mirror
lol

>>375929923
>When you replace a mirror in a game with a shiny texture, you're breaking immersion.

Fuck off with this shit.

There's an absolute shit load of things we have to overlook when playing video games due to technical limitations. It's called suspension of disbelief.

>>375929923
>When a company devises a game engine, it should always be something that's part of it. It doesn't matter how insignificant it seems

Pretty much any engine can do mirrors. It's just a matter of rendering into a texture, and I can't think of a single 3D engine made in the last decade that couldn't do it.

But if you want to implement mirrors in a way that doesn't significantly bump up rendertime, you're either going to have to come up with some new way to render 3D scenes or use some old rendering techniques that don't have the same drawbacks as modern ones (like some sort of raytracing engine or whatever).

File: 1291280-maxpayne2dream.jpg (38KB, 800x600px) Image search: [Google]

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mirrors are rad, I remember making duke nook maps that were puzzles based around mirrors.

>>375929923
>Have them scratched up, beyond use, or have them smashed, covered with blood/paint.
Many games do this and many still complain. Games just aren't at a point where much can be done with reflections. It would impact performance too much.

>>375930247
Look, I can deal with the fact that in most games I'm a floating pair of hands holding a gun, but mirrors are some serious disbelief I can't get over, especially when it's handled in a far too unbelievable fashion, like turning the surface into shiny black paint.

>>375930551
I wouldn't. At least it'd be more believable.

>>375930385

>But if you want to implement mirrors in a way that doesn't significantly bump up rendertime, you're either going to have to come up with some new way to render 3D scenes or use some old rendering techniques that don't have the same drawbacks as modern ones (like some sort of raytracing engine or whatever

you are right about most things but raytracing is even slower than redrawing the scene (since you can do frustum culling from the mirrror's perspective whereas raytracing you have to do a million intersection tests)

>>375914928
It was fun, and the whole mini planet thing was cool at the time.

>>375931040
>>375930385
also addendum; it can get more complex if you account for objects with lost process effects (like motion blur or glow) since you have to apply that to the mirror image as well, thus requiring you to run through the whole pipeline numerous times (imaging a lava lamp sitting in front of the mirror, or a transparent balloon)

File: really-makes-you-think.png (4MB, 1709x1923px) Image search: [Google]

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>mirrors are too taxing!!
>make fully functional fucking water reflections on even the simplest of shit
how about you just add a fucking reflections no/yes setting

>>375931607
The people you're talking to don't own PC's so they're not familiar with graphics settings like you are. All they know about is audio and control options.

>>375931607
Water reflections can also be very taxing, even though there's more room to lower the quality and use a bunch of tricks that wouldn't look good on a mirror (baking stuff, blur, leaving out some details, etc). The difference is that making a body of water look good is much more important than having a functional mirror in the corner of some toilet, so most devs deem it worth sacrificing a big chunk of the rendering time on it.

>>375932382
>so most devs deem it worth sacrificing a big chunk of the rendering time on it
"devs deem it worth sacrificing a big chunk of the rendering time on it" is the most asinine concept, as you're not forced into having reflections on.
Do developers also deem it worth sacrificing 100 GBs of VRAM for 1000x supersampling as well? No, they give the person playing their game a chance to sacrifice resources by themselves by implementing it as a setting, the above image of Stalker is actually a mod, and water reflections in games are severly limited and not seen outside of modded configurations/ENBs or source games.
There's a few exceptions but they're incredibly rare and nearly moot.

>>375912296
they would have to plan room layouts in advance to accommodate the room reflection room, game development is broken down into jobs for so many different people now, someone will grey box the level, then pass it on to someone to texture, then someone else for lighting, etc. etc. modern games are shit because they have to meet all these gfx requirements and there are not enough people talented enough to do all roles like they did pre-07.