How did working mirrors become a literal lost art in video games?

Why is it we have to desperately ration computing power now when old-school devs with vastly inferior resources didn't have to choose between one or the other?

Yeah, they are so optimized they need frame gen and upscaling to not look like incomprehensible fuzzy garbage.

when old-school devs with vastly inferior resources didn't have to choose between one or the other

Are you fucking retarded?

Old school devs were very, very heavily restricted in dynamic lighting and shadows due to the rendering process they used at the time. Shadows were expensive to do. Soft shadows were extremely expensive to do.

(Thing) is impressive when people first do it, but eventually becomes normal

Since its normal, games no longer get prestige for doing it

Devs stop bothering to do it

Many such cases

Modern game engines are designed so the least talented and cheapest workforce can use them. Previous games were made with more specialised workers and it was more about getting the game to run.

It's not hard to get working mirrors like that, all you have to do is render the scene again on the other side of the mirror. As you can imagine, this is extremely performance-intensive and if the scene gets complex it's going to be a problem.

How is 3D even possible without AMD's revolutionary 3D VCache?

highly optimized lighting and shadows

but those things are still expensive in Unreal and Unity, or what engines are you talking about?

mirrors are easy, they just dont bother making player model with animations thats typically why they dont include mirrors

This is not true.

If anything, modern engines are significantly more complex than older game engines and require a much expanded skillset to work with.

So they asked themselves "Which is more important; highly optimized lighting and shadows or the ability to do mirrors easily?

now they can't do either

Rekt

Why are mirrors so hard to make? For old games and news games what's the issue that makes them hard?

back in the days they used to run on VOODOO magic!

Uh, SORRY but if you care about mirrors in video games then you're a boomer, expecting devs to care about details like that is privileged and you should be grateful that you can buy games for only $80 dollars at all chud.

Which is by design, of course.

modern engines are middleware with tools so any tech illiterate retard can make a game in them

If every game had a cameraman following you that you could only see in the mirror, what would be the one of your favorite game?

Short version is unless you do some fancy trick, of which there aren't many options and none of them are great, you're rendering the scene twice which automatically halves your framerate.

What the fuck are you on about? Older game engines didn't exist and had to be made on hand. Now your average retard installs modern game engine and does an asset flip. Sure you can pretend there are complex optimisation pipelines and that you need to know about to use these engines but they aren't. We have unoptimised slop.

A tech illiterate may be able to get something vaguely resembling a very, very crude game to launch by following a tutorial but in regards to making a proper game at modern standards that is far, far, far, far harder today than it was before.

Isn't the current graphics meta entirely centered around more and more expensive lighting solutions (to justify making more and more expensive cards) at the cost of literally everything else?
Unironically games look worse now, and they run worse as well.

Older game engines didn't exist and had to be made on hand

People have been licensing game engines since the early 90s.

Also, games were a lot more simple back then so making a game engine used to be a relatively quick task. Also, using middleware is not new. Devs have used middleware for many decades now. For example, John Carmack didn't bother coding the audio engine for Doom. He licensed some middleware instead. So game devs didn't always make all of their game engine by hand. And we haven't even touched on shit like OpenGL and DirectX yet.

Saying far lots of time doesn't increase the complexity of a job which involves downloading assets from a store and stealing code from github. Games have never been easier to make for a layman and there are so many resources available.

at modern standards

like all the countless assetflips on unity and unreal made by people who can only copypaste?
you are totally cluless if you think making games is harder now
of course making something of high quality and complexity like some big RPG is hard, always been, but making an average game is easier than ever, and thats not even considering AI tools

you are totally cluless if you think making games is harder now

No, I'm not. I'm more clueful than you are. I made games in the 90s. I still make games today. It's a lot harder today.

Name one game engine which was licenced in the early 90s. Also cobbling together a game engine of middleware is a complex task. Pretending it is as simple as a unity install is disingenuous.

i don't buy the "more expensive to render" bullshit at all. we have modern games like nu hitman 2 where npcs will also react to your reflection in a mirror if you draw a weapon.

model I had, but I had the 8MB one

I upgraded from picrel.

Name one game engine which was licenced in the early 90s.

Seriously? You're really not aware that plenty of devs made FPS by licensing the Wolfenstein and Doom engines from id? Do you not know that 3D Realms did not make the engine for Duke 3D and just listened something called Build Engine that was literally made by a teenager as a hobby?

Also cobbling together a game engine of middleware is a complex task.

Not really, no.

There are tons of games that have surfaces that are otherwise reflective but are instead turned into foggy, cracked, or blurred surfaces with faint light reflections. If it were so easy, they would just make the surface reflective.

Modern devs are retarded, anon.

old school devs were working with 640x480 screens. 4k is 27 times more pixels to render. a single texture in a modern game can be bigger than the entire file size of a game in the 90s. hd is a scam. every time hardware gets to the point where it can easily run good looking grafix they screen jews release a new "standard" and then all of the computing power that could have gone to shit like making hair not look terrible ends up getting wasted on rendering more pixels. just think of where we could be now if people had the sense to say "NO" and decided that 1024x768 was all of the screen we would ever need.

Build engine
Pie in the Sky engine
Commander Keen's, Doom's and Wolfenstein's engines

Hitman not only has working mirrors, but enemies can spot you in them. Something not seen since Splinter Cell.

You forgot Physics, that's much bigger deal than mirrors because it actually affects gameplay

You are saying nonsense denying facts, if you had any experience you'd know that anyone with zero skills can make a game these days. And thats exactly why we have a massive flood of shovelware on steam and mobile and all the one-man-devs who make more impressive stuff than full teams could before.
You are only looking at AAA and think cause they are more complex and expensive than even then any gamedev must be harder than before.

YASUKE NOOOOOOOOO!

but enemies can spot you in them

That's actually pretty easy to do and not a particularly complex task that is going to tax performance.

A lot of features you can find in older games seems to have become a lost art.

if you had any experience you'd know that anyone with zero skills can make a game these days

My fucking 8 year old brother could whip up a game in basic back in those days. Being able to make a piece of shit game has never been hard.

like decent looking character models

Oh we are comparing id tech 1 to modern game engines? Yeah in hindsight it must look like inventing the wheel was a simple premise. Also power 3d and build engine were later into the 90s.

Because devs are retarded now and should kill themselves like niggers

mirror is cracked

stops reflecting

idTech 1 was inventing the wheel

lol

He saw some other dev's engine 3D engine and thought "I could do better than that." and it's debatable whether or not he actually did.

show us how it's done then

people don't even know how mirrors work anymore.

I want real working mirrors

I don't want Ray Tracing

which is it?

I've had people on Anon Babble tell me this is ok. They accept this. It's not a problem. Who cares?

People are cattle.

Because it's kind of stupidly retarded how expensive some of these methods become in modern tech.

render target reflection: a camera that basically works like a screen

Tends to have weird issues, and a performance cut depending on the engine and execution. This one seems to be partly a lost art but also just was never very good a method.

render a hidden extra room or a portal to one that is also rendering other character models parallel to the main room

FPS games barely want to spare proper renders of main characters with working animations from a third-person perspective you'd never see. Third person has less excuse- were it not for increased cost by doubling everything up for little more than an immersive benefit, and games are getting expensive on the GPU side of shit nowadays.

specialized renderer just to actually reflect what is directly in front of the mirror(s)

Also probably technically expensive with how fancy graphics are today, a lost art and too much work for modern devs that have to do boardroom and zoom meetings to alter a chair in a room.
Raytracing is a curse because everyone's just relying on this to be the standard to let them cheat these things in such a brutally unoptimized nightmare of inefficiency.

Debatable whether he actually did what? Your broken english and seething at id tech for writing the history of game engine design is stopping you from being able to structure sentences.

Can unreal be blamed? Surely not every single developer is so shit they can't get mirrors. But everyone game is unreal slop these days and almost every game has no mirrors.

every shard of the broken mirror reflects the same angle

You didn't trace the ray.

A little demon thing following Bayonetta around

Debatable whether he actually did what?

Make a better engine. His version of the engine had significantly less functionality than the Origin engine he was trying to improve upon.

seething at id tech for writing the history of game engine design

What the fuck are you talking about? Do you actually believe id was doing something unique that nobody else could?

Blew my mind how often you come across these awful mirrors in the first bit of the game. Surely they knew it looked terrible why the fuck did they put mirrors all over bel-air and beverly hills

lmao you are seething so badly at the guys who invented modern games it is hilarious

yet NSW looks like shit

Probably placeholder and they intended to actually have working mirrors but just never got it working.

i read using mirrors in a game with complex shaders causes things to break but i don't know how true that is

But the Epic shill told us it was awesome because it was free!!!!!

This literally just happened to me.
I unironically basedjacked in my gaming chair. They actually saw me in the mirror and turned around to shoot.

It is true. A lot of the optimizations are based around the fact you're rendering the scene once from a single angle. If you change the angle those optimizations don't work anymore.

what game? looks cool

How dare you not recognize that fine piece of ass in the mirror.

No one lives forever 1.
I don't have the link for the working widescreen version of the game anymore though and you literally can't buy it anywhere because of legal reasons.

game has working mirrors

sell 1mil

game doesnt have working mirror

also sells 1 mil

Lesson: not worth the effort. Games are products now and good product knows where to cut to optimize income.
The last Ratchet game was 30fps instead of the standard 60 for the series and the lead dev legit said that there was no proof 60fps sold better so why put in the effort.

And on pc its worse. I think gamersnexus will do a video on it soon, but they talked to a dev that had a game with RT on it, he tweaked it so it ran great on modern hardware. Nvidia took a look and told him to just set RT at max and suddenly he got 30fps on a 5090 and nvidia said, yeah.

So on console they will tell you 30fps is enough and on pc they will tell you a 2500,- card is also a fair price for 30fps

last ratchet on ps3

My bad

The last Ratchet game was 30fps instead of the standard 60 for the series and the lead dev legit said that there was no proof 60fps sold better so why put in the effort.

I'm sure it was more like "Better graphics and 30fps sells better than worse graphics and 60fps."

They aren't a lost art, most mirrors are just either cameras that point back at you or a mirroed room with an extra player npc behind it. It's just they aren't the shiny graphix thing anymore, it's all about RTX or whatever.

The old mirror tech was perfect for a single flat surface in an enclosed room like a bathroom, but insanely inapplicable for reflections in just about every other scenario
I just don't get why modern devs don't utilise the old ways in those instances where it is a single flat surface in a bathroom, I guess it absolutely fucks with the new nanite shit, or they didn't even bother trying

It's abandonware/in legal hell. Literally no company among Fox/Disney, Vivendi, Warner Bros, god knows who else, knows who the hell owns it anymore. Nightdive tried to do a remaster thing but gave up probably because it would've been too much of a hassle to poke any of these companies even a little.
You can download it and its sequel completely for free at the nolfgirl website along with the widescreen fix. The first one is great, the second one is good.

2025

The technology to render two small bathrooms at the same time is lost to humanity, never to be rediscovered

I just don't get why modern devs don't utilise the old ways in those instances where it is a single flat surface in a bathroom

Because it doesn't work. Modern rendering is highly optimized around rendering only the pixels needed for one camera only. To do a mirror you basically have to render the scene a second time which is a huge performance hit. This is why when they do have reflections that aren't just using SSR in these games it's always very low quality. Just really downgrading render quality is about all they can do to not kill performance.

Funny you should post the SH2 remake, because Bloober did an entire game that's entirely about split screen real world/nightmare world crap called Medium. It sucks and they barely made it work.

why did a guy into that room after you killed that nigger?

What about the other method of a second symmetical player character in a replica room?

It'll look like it's rendering a window to a doppleganger instead of reflection because there will be differences in the way the scene looks in the real scene to how it looks in the fake reflection. When rendering was simpler and gave a less dynamic image you could get away with stuff like that. Less so now.

highly optimized lighting and shadows

These things are absurdly gay.

Tony Hawk shits on modern lighting systems. The reflection lights are completely faked, they're under the ground and you can see them through the floor. Looks way better, because that was art DIRECTION, not the realism meme of "if we just design every prop to respond to every kind of light, we don't have to do any work!".

The worst is that things that we used to have for free, like alpha blending, now no longer exist. Hair textures are offensively jaggy now, due to these dogshit lighting engines that don't fucking work and produce nothing of value.

The last of us 2 has working mirrors so i dont know what the fuck youre crying anout

But they were broken again in The Last of Us 4. Fucking pajeet devs making UE5 goyslop.

I hope atleast one anon plays No One Lives Forever after seeing this thread

comedy spy FPS

cool gadgets and kino villains

woman protagonist more likeable than 99% of women in games made 20 years later

Modern devs would NEVER

Mirrors in real life are also typically found in small rooms. What's your point?

She's cool but you just know mentally ill twitter warriors would bury this game if it came out today as woke trash.

bad jokes

Lithtech bad collision detection

ugly even for its time

le Austin Powers Derek Flint aesthetic

It's shit.

make nois

alert guard

guard steps through door

guard shoots you

door opens

*noise

Better gwaphics.

why is doubling the geometry rendered harder when the poly count and lighting is exponentially more complex?

This is a third world question.

How come AAAA devs with hundreds of millions of dollars can't do what a bunch of lads did 25 years ago?

jews did this, unironically

It wouldn't come out today, devs are too woke

You have a few options for reflections:

1. Planar reflections: literally just mirroring what is in the room, objects, lighting, everything, as if the mirror were a portal to an identical but reversed room. Originally it was accomplished by actually making a room on the other side of the mirror, but modern engines have planar reflection shaders instead. This is what games used to do. It is a tremendously costly process in terms of performance.

2. Cube maps: Six static images (top, bottom, 4 sides) projected onto an object that give the illusion of the world around it being reflected. You wouldn't use this for a mirror, the images don't change.

3. Screen space reflections: A post-processing effect that can only reflect what is currently being rendered. Obviously would not work for mirrors unless you just want to see the mirror reflected in the mirror.

Which leaves ray tracing, which is how mirrors SHOULD be done. It's not that developers are bad and don't understand what they're doing, it's that you are bad and don't understand the trade offs that developers are making to balance fidelity and performance.

I got it from this site years ago.
Dunno why the owner of the website never setup HTTPS though

nolfrevival.tk

nigga i ain't clickin that shit

your loss

It's not 2010 anymore

downloading assets from a store and stealing code from github.

That's not what AAA studios are doing though, is it

I'm starting to think that this sort of shit really is just a marketing thing to make their product's backlash smaller.

If you ain't clicking it that's because your dumb. Everyone has known about this site upload for a while.

nice try fellas, good effort

because you're forcing the game to render the scene again and with today's more complex environments, it gets costly
though devs should still be able to do it for bathrooms which aren't very detailed or complex
ray tracing could solve things everywhere though

the way mario 64 did this was draw a second mario, draw a copy of the room you're in but flipped and to draw lakitu where the camera is
it's not actually reflecting anything

Light reflects off mirrors.
There hadn't been any proper lighting in new games, ever since Ray Tracing was a thing.

I bet all this does is render the doomguy on top of a plain cubemap made for each reflective surface
I doubt it's really redrawing the whole thing

I'd be up for a game going as hard on graphics as possible even if it played like shit, just to experience what we're capable of. Just tack on some kind of David Cage walking game

It's ray tracing, you can see the reflection of the environment and the neon signs in the distance on the surfaces as well.

I'd rather have a game with lower graphic fidelity but functional reflections than non reflecting mirrors and screen space slop

Meant for

Basically yes. Doom 2016 used SSR and for anywhere an SSR pixel didn't exist it would fallback to a cubemap.They just did a simple reverse render of the front of doomguy and nothing else and then pasted it into the reflection.

No AAA studios have entire factories of indians shitting out terrible assets. With smaller silos trying to cobble together all the assets they are being thrown. Their 15 managers having meetings complaining about why their silos aren't talking. Not understanding that they are the issue and that there didn't need to be 20+ units with 7 layers of management above them.

Modern game engines are like the AAA studios. Bloated and designed to cater to young graduates. With a dumbed down enough design that their manager who knows nothing about anything thinks they are capable of leading the teams using those simple tools.