Mirror, mirror, On the Wall...

[EmissaryOfWind]

I know I'm going to make an ass of myself by suggesting this but why not take the output from the third person view and frame it to look like a mirror? It's just the effect of realism we want, not the perfection of reflection.

 

"When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME..." :tongue:

 

That's not how it works. Whatever your view is, your computer only renders objects from that particular camera angle. When you are in 1st person, it doesn't render any of the 3rd person angles, it just renders exactly what you're looking at.

 

As was said by a few of you, that means making a mirror requires to render another camera angle, so twice the workload, so half the framerate, which can be fine for some people's hardware and settings, but not others (cough*me*cough)

[TeamBacon]

That's not actually how rendering works. It is far more complex than 'twice as many objects means twice as much rendering'.

 

The most simple way I can explain it is that 3 unique items take more rendering than 3 instances of the same item. But it gets much more complex then that when you start talking about how game engines optimize things. I'm not really qualified to explain it all though, as I just work in different game engines, I don't program them.

[ZardozIX]

Ok, I understand. Then I officially declare this request dead and buried.

 

But I did learn more and thats the point of forums.

Thanks for the enlightenment.

[JuJooGuppy]

Hmm. I knew I had relatively limited understanding of it. I mean I knew the portals had to be creating a camera, but, I had assumed that since the scene was already rendered, it wouldn't need to render again. *shrug* You learn something new every day. going to have to go read up on how game engines go about rendering.

[Boombro]

You can make the mirror pop out the PA crafting.

It would simply stop the animations and just pop out the menus and objects if it was the same as skyrim. Needs testing however.

[TeamBacon]

Hmm. I knew I had relatively limited understanding of it. I mean I knew the portals had to be creating a camera, but, I had assumed that since the scene was already rendered, it wouldn't need to render again. *shrug* You learn something new every day. going to have to go read up on how game engines go about rendering.

 

Instances take far less time to render, but it is not cut down to zero either.

 

Both the idea the a mirror takes twice the rendering and the idea that a mirror doesn't have any impact are very far from the truth. Though long story short, it isn't really a big deal for a modern game engine to have a mirror, it isn't going to kill anyone's performance. The reason we don't have mirrors in most games is because the game designers didn't think they were necessary for that game.