mirror

I'm no coder - just a humble player, and I was wondering if there is a mirror texture available, or is it too hard to implement in this kind of environment?

I'd like to have reverse-mirrors for my home - so I can see out but ppl cant see in - is this possible?

I'd also like to make mirrored clothing...

Reverse mirros or easy: you can have different textures on different side of an object. This means you can have a see through on one side and regular on the other.


Mirros in general are a LOT of work, CPU wise. Think about how much work it takes to draw what you do see, a mirror takes just as much work (more or less) but with a smaller window. Its still a LOT of work. And if people were to put a lot of them together ..... put it this way, it wouldn't take very many to bring the fastest home processor out there to a halt.

Yea, they can be done, and I have seen em in games, but those games usually are with controlled maps, not a dynamic world like SL, where its much harder to enforce the performance balancing they require.

yes, I have seen it done in other games too, such as Half Life and Duke Nukem 3D.

The fact that Duke Nukem ran on my old PC made me think it wouldn't be too hard, but if the world is ever changing then I guess it would be.

I don't fully understand scripting but would it be possible to script it?

With my limited understanding of scripting I envision the possible way to do it would be to make an object, write a script that mirrors the avatar and background to a certain distance, and display that on the front texture of the object.

Of course, it may not be possible to do this, and I wouldn't know where to begin in the first place


BTW: I didn't register in 1970...

Yeah the difference is the environment is way more controlled in those games and polygon counts are a lot lower than SL, as is detail, etc. And the fact that someone would undoubtedly try and make a room of mirrors which would kill anyone who walked into it.

Also some of those mirrors are 'fake' - they don't really show the back ground, just a reflection of the avatar and the background is a static picture, more or less, of what that mirror would see. It may move some, think a window into a box with a picture at the back of the box - you can see different portions of the picture depending on where you stand, but its not rendered in real time.

But really I think the issue is that performance is tough enough (although the next version looks good!) that I don't want people posting up refective surfaces.