Working mirrors

[jcbrom]

There's a real waters reflection here: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/5839/?

If this guy can make all the water in the game have real reflections without breaking the game with lag, I'm sure its possible to do it with the mirrors.

[Reneer]

There's a real waters reflection here: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/5839/?

If this guy can make all the water in the game have real reflections without breaking the game with lag, I'm sure its possible to do it with the mirrors.

There is a huge difference in necessary computing power between those water reflections and an "actual" mirror. Those water reflections, for one, are blurry. Secondly and more importantly, the objects are just being "flattened" onto the water texture - there's no three dimensions there, it's just basically taking a few 3D objects and rendering them in 2D. A mirror must keep that 3D in order to be realistic and that is where the problem comes in because you have to literally render everything twice - once in front of the mirror for your standard view and then again "behind" the mirror, which really isn't a mirror but simply a transparent pane. Or you do some fancy rendering to convert the reflection into a texture map that you then apply to the "mirror", but still the basic issue applies: You have to render everything twice. Which is why whenever you see a mirror in a game it is usually a scripted scene that the developers specifically made to be "cheap" in terms of rendering time so that it can be rendered twice.

Edited June 9, 2017 by Reneer

[Ethreon]

Yea, no.

[montky]

@jcbrom

indeed, that project is intriguing for a number of reasons.

I find a lot of the other ideas they've got for v3 are very awesome indeed!

thanks again for the renewed interest though.

 

it is a little tricky, on account of the n^x! worth of potential looks for locales,

a lot of places can look very different because of the combinatorial nature of the customization features.

that, and having toggleable camera instances which could be bound to a nurbs-surface...

that is really tricky on a number of levels.

eg will a mirrored surface reflect a holographic 'television of the wasteland'?

how about, in a new lands, will it 'reflect' the worldbox properly?

 

it's a nodal Jaroslav Kurzweil and Hamilton-Ricci-Perelman homeomorphism for the detect param on which mirrors see what,

so as to not have to render all the mirrors all the time... it's only there when you're looking at it.

that keeps the set size 'manageable' and not approaching an infinitude, such as Aleph-Null (shudders) from non-standard analysis.

the special case of a highly polished codsworth, and

the oft quoted "hall of mirrors/infinity mirror paradox" are also interesting to consider.

 

 

 

Basically, its like in the optimization thread;

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/5522717-fallout-4-optimization-and-performance-systems-explained/

if we can pre-batch some mirrors, and have them nodally activate a camera instance only when it would be visible...

it may be possible to have some mirrored surfaces,

such as those in Universe Sim, Star Citizen, GTA V, ARMA etc

 

the camera instance must be taking images at a certain rate (to form the .gif or .swf on the decal)

or somehow read-writing an animation to the surface.

this can become transcomputational or exceeding of the holographic bremermann's limit where the information to be processed by

the mirrors exceeds the lower data exchange bound, t-subdelta-p.

in practice, for present avg computing setups, we need to keep that below a quadrillionth of that lower bound... hehe.

 

let alone, Thomson's Contrapositive-Intransative Switch paradox, involved in the timing of the images and processing rates...

that will be tricky for large amounts of variable mirrored surfaces - say, d'fresnel and fisheye ones of various undulating surfaces...

 

-----

such things are a camera instance that is mapped to a read-writeable decal,

we're yet to see how many game cameras can be in a Creation scene at any one time.

 

a lot of that is a duplication on the 'doorportal' decal, allowing a seemless door portal

to connect to a new lands, which allows you to 'see into' the new lands area based on viewing angle,

all without needing loading.

this is great, where you cannot change things within viewing distance of the doorportal.

say, for caverns etc.

but, in the case of that cheshire blue box, if you change the interior new lands, but don't pre-batch the doorportal,

then what you see of the box that's larger on the inside, does not match what you see once you step through the door.

 

It is possible to make these projects,

though it would require collaborations and teamups,

something which many nmm nexite FO4 modders are... reticent to do.

(low RoI, high complexity, EULAs, lack of incentives etc)

 

-----

they said 2D-3D sprite holograms, and decals on surfaces 'couldn't be done'.

how did we achieve the holographic statues? screencaps of the game, which then have Script-Fu applied to them in post,

and then are brought back into the game later. It's a Wilber 3rd order feedback loop,

and that's how you can do cool things like "the family portrait" etc.

 

how do we achieve better forcefields, or holographic entryways?

screenshots, animations for the texture with keyframes being the solid texture.

(you can look at how ARMA 3,5 Kingdom Hearts, Portal, and GTA V, not to mention many 2D-3D stuff functions for an idea of that)

see - "an in-game analog cloaking device" from ST:O and Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous...

that allowed folks to take screencaps at a certain rate for brief periods, to texture hot-swap,

which gave them 'cloaking capabilities' for a brief period.

 

you can take those images based on the character that's then posed,

such as with the mannequin mod or player character statue mod etc...

 

mirrors are similar.

so, we might not be able to make all mirrored surfaces accurately reflect properly,

but, we can make a few key mirrored surfaces properly mirror...

such as in controlled environments,

internal windows etc.