From a technical level why can't video games have working mirrors anymore? - WHY?!

[Forsaken Wanderer]

I've not seen a AAA game with a working mirror in a decade, why is this?

 

[Spud]

The people who could do it have died off, they don't have the knowledge anymore.

 

[Involuntary Celebrity]

Turn on ray tracing.
Older games did it basically by faking it with a clone of the player model/sprite, sometimes in an entire copy of the room behind the mirror, or rarely a second camera rendering to a texture or maybe some stencil buffer tricks.
But when you have more a complex lighting setup or graphical pipeline (ie a stack of postprocessing effects) it becomes difficult or impossible and certainly not worth the effort to set up. It also dropped out of fashion in the era where the player model might have taken up more than half the polygon budget.

It's come back with raytracing because it's easy to set up, except in the case of first-person shooters where you often don't have a player model in the scene at all. It's not really worth making one at the level of detail we'd expect now just for that, and even if a cinematic model exists that could be loaded in just when you enter a bathroom it still wouldn't be worth making it match your movements well--and if it's gonna look jank anyway, there's an argument for not distracting the player with it when they're used to fogged-up mirrors already.

 

[Forsaken Wanderer]

The people who could do it have died off, they don't have the knowledge anymore.

Indeed the developers of today take 10 years to make a gigantic mess of a game with is overly bloated and runs poorly. The digital dark ages.

Turn on ray tracing.
Older games did it basically by faking it with a clone of the player model/sprite, sometimes in an entire copy of the room behind the mirror, or rarely a second camera rendering to a texture or maybe some stencil buffer tricks.
But when you have more a complex lighting setup or graphical pipeline (ie a stack of postprocessing effects) it becomes difficult or impossible and certainly not worth the effort to set up. It also dropped out of fashion in the era where the player model might have taken up more than half the polygon budget.

It's come back with raytracing because it's easy to set up, except in the case of first-person shooters where you often don't have a player model in the scene at all. It's not really worth making one at the level of detail we'd expect now just for that, and even if a cinematic model exists that could be loaded in just when you enter a bathroom it still wouldn't be worth making it match your movements well--and if it's gonna look jank anyway, there's an argument for not distracting the player with it when they're used to fogged-up mirrors already.

Why does raytracing make it easy to setup mirroring? FPS games are where I notice the fogged-up mirrors the most. I can understand it looks a bit janky looking at your characters movements but it is a shame that it's been decided it's not worth the bother. Some puddle reflections would be nice at least.

 

[Involuntary Celebrity]

Why does raytracing make it easy to setup mirroring?

Because it's basically one click to turn it on for that surface. Reflections just become a standard engine thing and no trickery is needed. It's no different to the reflection in a puddle except you'd make the material a lot less busy than a street surface so you can actually see yourself.
...And puddle reflections are like the main thing you notice it on with ray tracing (well, until your brain stops caring; the wow factor with modern RT lasts like 10 minutes tbh), those are super common in games now if you have a card that can do it.

 

[Forsaken Wanderer]

Because it's basically one click to turn it on for that surface. Reflections just become a standard engine thing and no trickery is needed. It's no different to the reflection in a puddle except you'd make the material a lot less busy than a street surface so you can actually see yourself.
...And puddle reflections are like the main thing you notice it on with ray tracing (well, until your brain stops caring; the wow factor with modern RT lasts like 10 minutes tbh), those are super common in games now if you have a card that can do it.

Ah I see, thanks for the explanation. So in that case we are probably not likely to see many reflections until games stop trying to be realistic or until there is enough tech power and knowledge (if ever) to make player characters move smoothly.

 

[DankSmoker]

Vampires

 

[Forsaken Wanderer]

Vampires

So if they just make every single game a vampire clan war then there is no need to reflect anyone, that is genius. Even the rats can be vampires as well.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I saw a working mirror in Caligula Effect 2 of all places. In the final dungeon, there's a tiny mirror that reflects. A game from 2021 that looks like it came out on the PS3 has working mirrors.

 

[Involuntary Celebrity]

Ah I see, thanks for the explanation. So in that case we are probably not likely to see many reflections until games stop trying to be realistic or until there is enough tech power and knowledge (if ever) to make player characters move smoothly.

Well, there's plenty of both already but the thing is it's really not worth making 1:1 third-person assets in a first-person game where you'd never see them otherwise. They pretty much all looked goofy in older FPS games with mirrors too, but you didn't expect it not to and lots of other things looked goofy anyway.

An exception to this *might* be games with a multiplayer component, but there's usually actually a lot of fudging going on there with how you see other players move--you can't see their screen and yours at the same time so the priority is for their third-person player models to look and move like a human rather than perfectly reflecting what they're seeing.
A big obvious example of this would be games where your first-person reload animation looks completely different to how you see other players reload. But it can go for a lot of things, like the way their head/arms/upper body moves when looking up and down... and it's very obvious when your reflection is angling the only things you can see on your viewmodel in a different way than your actual perspective shows.

So that'd be just as true in a singleplayer game, and you'd have to trade away a lot of conventions for how you expect those games to control (like your eyes usually being lower than where your head should be, the fact that your body turns around a pivot point between your eyes, the fact that looking up doesn't shift your viewpoint backwards in the way that a person would need to bend to keep balance and maintain a gun at their cheek, etc) for the reflection to actually match. Even games with a "full body awareness" type playermodel instead of a normal viewmodel generally fudge most of this shit.

 

[Forsaken Wanderer]

@Involuntary Celebrity It almost sounds like mirrors would be great in a VR multiplayer game. At least then I hope to see mirrors in all of these "boomer shooters" since they can get away with movement looking more janky with the stylized looks.

I'm curious then if modern racing games have reflections in puddles and lakes since in theory it should be a lot easier to make a car look nice when mirrored.

I spose the mirror trick was best in Duke3D when you didn't even see Duke's sprite change weapons or anything, it was just very basic movement.

 

[Active User]

An exception to this *might* be games with a multiplayer component, but there's usually actually a lot of fudging going on there with how you see other players move--you can't see their screen and yours at the same time so the priority is for their third-person player models to look and move like a human rather than perfectly reflecting what they're seeing.
A big obvious example of this would be games where your first-person reload animation looks completely different to how you see other players reload. But it can go for a lot of things, like the way their head/arms/upper body moves when looking up and down... and it's very obvious when your reflection is angling the only things you can see on your viewmodel in a different way than your actual perspective shows.

To easily demonstrate this, boot up TF2, go into the console and type cl_first_person_uses_world_model 1. It swaps the first person viewmodels to what would actually be seen with the third person model if your camera was in the character's eyes. It was designed for VR, and makes the game look very, very different. With the console commands you can freely change a lot about the first person viewmodels or even disable them entirely, they're not actually linked up to the globally visible character model.

Also fun fact, your bullets usually come out of your eyes rather than out of your gun in games like this, especially in hitscan games. I know some games go out of their way to avert this such as Insurgency but I don't believe it's the norm yet. That's why you get headglitching.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

Still remember the framerate dipping from 60 to like 15 during in the 2013 Shadow Warrior during the bathroom head shaving scene and how fucking awful the animation was.
Duke Nukem Forever was also a prime showcase because that game does not have first person viewmodels. The full player model is rendered at all times and your PoV is a camera stuck just ahead of Duke's glasses, you can even see how it clips through his head during some cutscenes if you're using beer and/or steroids (this is why GBX was so adamant about not allowing FoV higher than 90). All human NPCs able to engage in combat use the same animations, which is why their bodies remain ramrod stiff save for the arms when they fire/reload/use gun butt melee attacks. The head doesn't turn, but the entire torso does. Legs aren't included in those animations either. See below.

 

[Betonhaus]

Well now i want a fps game that takes place in a massive house of mirrors or otherwise environments that always have a lot of reflections going on.

 

[Sean Shemmy]

You know why? It's because you touch yourself at night.