Mirrors and reflective surfaces really seem to be a struggle in modern-day games unless you are using RT, and of course, that has a huge performance penalty so I am quite curious why these techniques that were used in the 90s have fallen out of favour for other techniques that produce significantly worse results visually.
In: Technology
That technique had a hard limitation of only being usable in a single small room where a small number of characters (ideally just one – the player character) is reflected.
Imagine trying to apply that technique for *water reflection* in an outside environment. You’d need to duplicate *the entire world*, all characters, every leaf of every tree, the skybox, any buildings or mountains in the background, everything. Any changes to one version of things, you’d need to replicate to their duplicate (so any physics, all animations, VFX like fire and blood splatter, etc etc). Plus, you’d effectively be rendering everything twice. This would all be insanely expensive, much more so than just using a simple screen-space reflection (which is a different kind of hack, you should read it up, i think you’d find it interesting). This is all for one plane of water – now think about reflective armor on your character, the windows of the nearby buildings, and anything else in the world that could be reflective. That old hack is just not practical in any other setting than a single room with as few characters as possible and not much gameplay happening.
Latest Answers