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Working mirrors


SignorNessuno

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I know it sounds corny, but because you can not have some glass or mirror surfaces that reflect all that surrounds them? Sounds a bit frustrating to go in front of a mirror and not see anything, if only one "unidentified" piece of glass?

Would not it be better if you have these mirrors reflect, instead of always showing that gray / white, or that they are always all broken, as an excuse to understand that you can not reflect the image in a mirror in Fallout 4, for limitations due to the graphics engine?

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@signornessuno

that is a good question!

this should have a warning - "spoilers: once you notice this, you can't un-notice it!"

that is an interesting reflection... (pun unintentional)

it might give players a vampire complex hehe.

for low-end setups, that would be a horrific nightmare, real reflections and all!

 

there are already reflections in most games like FO4, DICE games, GTA5, Portal etc.

upcoming games such as Universe Sim and Star Citizen also look interesting, as various reflections at 1:1 simulation of the universe appear possible...

the FO series is a little trickier, because of all the other things going on, and that good ol'

n^x or nCr + nPr ... the downsides to combinatorics and lots of options,

is... well, there's a lot. (nested problems of the vast, and problems of sorting)

not only can people change the settlements and terrain via the editor builder and mods,

they can also change their player avatar - even mid-way through a game.

 

indeed, Ethreon is being directly on the money with it being a tricky thing.

Ethreon is alluding to things like the game Portal and the 'hall of mirrors'/"infinity mirror overflow paradox",

among other things.

it is tricky to do, and tricky in such a way as to get that 'verisimilitude' folks are looking for.

 

for each mirror surface, you'd have to take a lot of screenshots so as to capture what is visible from that particular user-instance-gamestate.

this is because, the configuration that the reflective surface sees would be prone to change - it is a floating-point indeterminate variable.

if you want to be able to point binoculars or a scope towards a mirror in FO4 and resolve details in the mirror/telescope...

you'd need those screenshots to be large ~16K etc.

 

remember too though,

for ages, folks thought that conceptually, the data-transfer pipeline rate for the Internet would be impossible to resolve,

and yet here we are, talking on the internet. We got around that, and eventually, games'll get around some other issues too

 

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I digress -

having made some texture dabblings with the "real-lava lava lamp" (more of a 2D sprite on a face-group than a simulated surface outright, because you cannot pick up and shake the lavalamps in FO4 yet).

lenticular surfaces to nuka-quantum bottles/diffraction and reflection from different glass surfaces (leibniz gasket from a nuka quantum, fractal diffraction from a lenticular surface, d'fresnel warping after damage etc)

animations on a TV-instance surface for playing on a loop at "books"/training facilities in the Wasteland,

textures which change color relative to viewing angle etc,

It could be possible...

 

if the game had some read-write capability, perhaps an AGI functionality of some kind

and the game took a 'screenshot' of the in-game surroundings...

these screenshots could be held in a buffer for distributed cloud computing (if you wanted to go the 'online enabled living agreement game" kinda way...), or could be pre-batched on the developers bank of supercomputers...

and then merged this with a transparent layer of the player avatar generated periodically at bootup.

you could further limit this, to only taking screenshots from the reflective surfaces when placed etc.

(this would be a Perelman-Jaroslav Kurzweil esque implementation).

You're taking the screenshots and read-writing only while looking at it, and I think that'd have to be done,

because things will be moving around in the reflection etc.

 

perhaps, this is handled by an AGI, that only does "100%" for near-ground features,

and will try and reduce the quality of reflections the further the distance from the player character that reflection would be...

indoors won't necessarily be as high-a-quality reflection as outdoors.

glass panes and other reflective surfaces might be also of a lesser quality etc.

 

You'd do this as a pre-batching thing and compress it.

you want to make it as homeomorphic as possible - so as it eats up the least envelope. that way, we have space and features for other interesting stuff.

You don't want this to be chugging in the background when you're in the institute or downtown boston.

think of all that glass and metal and water and shiny things... and then add Liberty Prime, 40 BoS power armors and Codsworth to the mix.

thats a lotta lotta shadows and n'th-level reflections.

You'll have multiple "infinity mirror" effects.

for the special case of codsworth or moving mirror surfaces...

you'd have a lot of things moving.

now, imagine destructible terrain... and we want to have proper reflections and deformations for all of those surfaces?

(picture that scene from Superman 3 where superman is warping the mirror with heatvision, or from Terminator 2 where the T1000 is liquid metal)

 

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Short version;

so, when the player stands infront of a reflective surface,

that reflective surface;

- is taking a screenshot from its "camera" back towards the player (and potentially beyond the draw distance. cell issue?) this screenshot is displayed on a read-writable face-group on the object surface.

-has to update inside of the frame-refresh-rate so as the discerning player doesn't notice it,

-different reflective surfaces have different reflective or photo-optic or spectrographic properties ie, such as focal length, focal distance etc...

 

I think this could be partially doable -

most mirror surfaces to that level will be indoors. there's not a lot of movement. You're not going to see all of the draw distance in that -

you're only going to see what is in that room, with some outside influences maybe.

it is only the outdoors or moving mirror surfaces like Codsworth which will be very hair-pullingly fun to get to look right and work stable.

most reflective surfaces are only partially reflective and produce a low-resolution reflection too.

very few gamers are going to be scrutinizing the game with a fine-tooth physics comb,

looking for hyper-realism to do astrophysics in the Fallout Universe hehe.

 

I hope to see an ambitious project such as this one start to form;

I look forward to hearing from holographers, 3D 360 vid makers and others who might have an insight into

how to make different reflections happen in FO4.

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Once again I avoid reading most of your text simply due to how you write it. There's no trick - rendering a scene twice for a game that already struggles with performance would be a complete killer, and a tiny mirror is not worth it.

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the engine just sucks it might not be possible but if it is you'll need a monster PC

Are you alright? There's no monster PC that can render Fallout 4 scenes twice, at once.

See, now you'll get someone arguing that they could manage it on a server which is technically a computer so you're wrong... Or some bollocks.

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The vanilla game already struggles due to unoptimization (and Bethesda continuing the fine tradition of rendering entire meshes for objects in the worldspace that are not fully visible)

FO4 doesn't even have real water reflections (even FO3 did that better!) so there's no hope of having realistic-looking reflections in mirrors.

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