are all my sculptures going to be turned into mirrors if they have shine on them?

I didn't get to test mirroring before it was disabled, but nearly all of my work has shine on it. When FL is released, will all my work suddenly become mirrors?

If so, I beg of you LL to make mirroring a feature in the features tab, apart from shine.

I'd send an IM or forum PM or email to Steve Linden to start out finding a real answer to how reflections would actually be introduced into the SL world.

Making all the shiny stuff in existence look like the reflective stuff might be the single worst decision LL ever made, so hopefully they have in mind to do something along the lines of what Stormy suggests.

You can still turn on reflection by going to "Client->Debug Settings" and setting "RenderDynamicReflections" to TRUE.

Everything shiny becomes reflective. Even low shiny.

I agree that this should be changed so that only surfaces explicitly flagged as reflective become reflective.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the OP was asking if everything's going to be reflective by default.

In that case, no. Reflections are not an "official" feature yet and won't be enabled by default. It'll only be available in the Debug Settings, as described by Argent in the above post.

Delta: you're right and wrong.

Right in that *this* release won't have shiny by default.

Wrong in that it matters whether shiny is off by default in the next release or in the next ten releases. Because eventually it will be on by default or on for enough people that the OP should be concerned by whether "shiny" implies "reflective" or not.

What matters is whether when shiny is released (whether or not this FL release is the one) it's a separate option or not.

OK, the latest FL (58390) has completely nerfed RenderDynamicReflections. The cube map is now so blurred it looks more like they reduced shiny by 50% than they turned it into reflective.

I don't care whether or not reflections are on by default in the viewer. All that changes is the way "I" get to see shine/reflections. That has nothing to do with whether or not a shiney object I've created will be a mirror on someone else's screen.

This is a very big deal. A 100-600 prim sculpture that is entirely reflective (because I use low shine on marble textures) is going to be detrimental to performance. This means I can either keep my sculptures as is, rendering them useless to most everyone, or retexture and remove shine from most all of my inventory.

Shine and reflection really need to be independant of eachother.

This would be true if the way reflections were being calculated were individually for each reflective surface. All the versions we've seen so far however, calculate a texture (or small number of textures) that get used for all reflective surfaces everywhere. It's a cheat of course, but it doesn't matter how many prims are reflective, the performance hit from adding reflection is going to be the same.

I never saw the original reflective
We should be able to choose the cube-map detail and have it affected by LOD, and become dynamic in lower-lag areas. It's our machines, we can bring to them to their knees if we want.

And I'm pretty sure reflective is going to be a separate option, it would be downright stupid of LL to do otherwise. Some objects will look horrible with reflective forced upon them, so we need shiny as well.

Well, it also changes whether other people see them as well. If it's not on by default, then anyone who sees reflections sees them because they chose to.

See the message from the SLDev mailing list I quoted in the other mirror thread (title "How mirrors work" - Shiny and Reflective will be separate attributes.

It won't make any difference to performance at all. The way the mirror hack works in SL, the only difference between reflective and shiny is which cube-map gets used. Generating the reflective cube map has a big impact, but it shoudl be no more expensive to apply it or the skybox to a surface.