Reflective (as in a mirrored surface) prims?

I haven't been able to find how to mirror a surface in SL, so I decided to do a search in the votes. I found several duplicate proposals, and I was wondering if anyone who has voted on it in the past would try to consolidate to this one:

http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=1815

It seems like the most unambiguous one. Having mirrors in SL would be nice, I think.

Cheers!

The problem with mirrored surfaces is the amount of processing time it takes to make and update images within them.

Can't be done with current SL technology. Each mirrored surface that your avatar can see essentially doubles the number of calculations that the client has to make to determine what you can see. It rapidly would bring a normal SL user's computer to a standstill.

Until home computers and the Internet both get much faster, this simply will not happen in a real-time, 3D environment.

There are a couple creative tricks for 'faking it', however. Search for 'Reflection' and 'mirror' in these forums. It's been discussed before, in detail.

Ah, I could see all of that. Perhaps a harsh rendering distance limitation would be useful. Oh Internet2, where are you?

I didn't see any useful links in my search, but I'll try again.

There are some cool tricks you can do to make a mirror effect, so while you dont have a mirror texture there is a way to do the effect.

To elaborate, since I can't readily find links to the other threads either, there are two neat tricks that I am aware of for simulating a mirrored reflection.

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I have a freebie item that someone else made, called "Surprising mirror" or something like that. It's a vanity table and mirror like you would have in a bedroom or dressing room, with a stool in front of it. Sit on the stool, and you appear to see yourself in the mirror, and can use a menu to get yourself to do about a dozen common gesture animations, like brushing your hair or blowing a kiss.

What that one does is to actually move you behind the mirror frame, animating your avatar with the chosen actions, and using a camera in front of the mirror to show your view. It's a cute trick.

Flaws: Illusion only works for you. Everyone else in the room sees what's really happened. The details on your avatar are not reversed left to right, and you don't see reflections of anything or anyone else in the rioom. Just your head and upper body, framed in the mirror. Still, it's a pretty realistic effcts.

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Haven't seen other than screen shots of the other trick, which is a complex builder's ploy, that is VERY prim heavy. It allows you to make a reflecting pool or puddles that appear to reflect the buildings, trees and other static sim elements around the area.

This one works by making a perfect, mirror-reversed copy of the entire build, upside down and below the ground plane. The surface of the reflecting pool or puddles is actually mostly or completely transparent, so you see the 'reflection build' below the ground, and percieve that you are seeing the above ground part in a reflection. The illusion is percieved by everyone in the sim, and works from almost any angle, if you do a full duplicate build.

Flaws: Only shows the sim build. Does not show the avatars or any movable items, and does not reflect the sun or moon. Haven't been to one of these, but I think they may have to also lock the sun or moon in one position in the sky, as I can't imagine how they could get the 'false sky' behind the lower build to look right, otherwise. A very prim heavy effect. Truly spectacular, but you'd almost have to own the sim to have the resources to pull in off on any large scale.

a fabulous example of the second trick can be seen at Devils Moon

That is indeed one of the sims I know uses that trick. The puddles on the ground have very good reflections done this way, as I have heard. Well worth going to see. I just haven't had time yet to see it myself.

That reference allowed me to find one of the threads that discussed mirrors in SL at length. It's located here.

This simply is not true. Mirrored surfaces and reflective surfaces within 3D online environments already exist on both the lowly PS2 and Xbox, and plenty of examples can be found on the PC and more and more on the Xbox 360.

Second Life's five year old rendering technology is the problem. Once all prims have been transferred client-side all mirrors and reflections are calculated there, and five year old videogame technology can perform these calculations, often at 60 frames a second. On the Xbox 360 you're even getting multiple Picture-in-Picture location renderings of the world in real time.

Before coming back with the standard fare "it's not the same, the world is being built" excuse, any 3D world that relies on updating multiple clients with common positional information is in the same class. It makes no difference that the geometry and textures are streaming from a distant server as opposed to a local hard drive or optical storage. The biggest issue here is the way Second Life caches (or more importantly doesn't cache) resources.

Second Life's renderer doesn't support true bump mapping, normal mapping, shaders or many other rendering technologies that existed before its initial release, much less systems that have made quantum leaps in the last three years thanks to graphic cards and their accompanying APIs. The issue here isn't slowness of current personal computers nor broadband, it is the limited resources at Linden Lab's disposal for revising these antiquated systems. Until as much attention is showed to the backbone as is applied to the User Interface and policy decisions, Second Life's graphics will continue to be in the same league as Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 3 and Renderware technology from nearly five years ago.

Yeah I have to agree with Clubside on that one, SL is is basically TombRaider 2 maybe 3. I think Lara's flexi ponytail appeared in what, 1997? When you look at Oblivion or Tombraider Legend you kinda have to wonder. The avatars are basically Poser 2 with some modifications. Even with a new, high end video card, SL still plays much like a 7 year old game. It has come a long way since I started 2 years ago but it isn't up to what the technology is capable of today. LL is using open source and older tech to save money to pay for servers and bandwidth rather than reflective prims that only a small minority of SL users could see anyway.

So if the Havok dream ever comes true, we may see this?

Havoc 2 is outdated almost as much as Havoc is. Havoc is a phyisics engine. Havoc2 would see more prims per vehicle, better collisions and things like ragdoll and swinging ropes and chains, that sort of thing. Reflections are a rendering problem.

i wish Linden labs would look into changing of 3D engine or get consulting from companies like ID software or Epic wichn are very good at making 3D engines

LL could go out Monday and licence the same engine Oblivion uses.. for about 10 million. LL doesn't have that much to toss about.. then again the minimum specs on something like Oblivion would make 80% of the current computers used for SL incapable of running it. Then too, Havoc 2 has been delayed mainly because it will break just about everything in SL that uses physics in some way.

Also, the way LL works, the employees have a lot of freedom in choosing what to work on. Being folks tend to like being employed, they tend to choose projects that have some chance of succeeding so they can keep the paychecks rolling in. Nobody wants to work on huge projects that have a good likely hood of failing like Havoc2. What would you rather choose, ripple water that took a few hours but made a big difference in the look of SL or spending 6 months working on Havoc 2 and have it utterly fail?

The biggest problem Linden Lab will face is breaking the current system and much of the "content" by updating the underpinnings. As Kathmandu correctly states, the current development model does not place employees directly into position to deal with the larger issues that keep Second Life the antiquated system it has been for many years.

Havok is only one piece of the puzzle, and server-side fix that through optimzations would improve performance, link limits, prim limits and more. Rendering fixes could motly happen client-side, wth the server merely updated to track additional properties to describe things such as mirrored surfaces.

It is true that technologies like the Unreal 3, Doom 3 and Source engines can be expensive to license. The sad fact is that even cheap-to-license 3D tech like that of Garage Games (the Torque engine at http://www.garagegames.com) while being as old at Second Life was already well ahead of it.

Ultimately a choice will be made, by the company or the users, as to what direction development takes. The current "business" model of Second Life appeals to a small segment of the public, and a new "Second Life" type product could easily be deployed if any serious development house saw it as a path to a larger community of users. So far no one has for many reasons I and others have discussed in other threads. Linden Lab could make a change if it was in the interest of their current business model, but that doesn't appear to be the case.