Mirrors in EverQuest
I never did play EverQuest, but in many ways it has similarities to Star Wars Galaxies, by the sound, including player houses. Very cool little note here: mirrors that you can buy and hang in your house act as true mirrors, bouncing back your avatar's reflection.
I'm sure there are other games that do this, but I'm not sure I've seen it in action yet.
Didn't Duke Nukem 3D have that? Anyway, I'm sure Hitman has it, and lots of other first person shooters as well.
Posted by: Michiel | June 12, 2006 at 07:53
I saw it in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory just last night. Onboard the big cargoship in the second mission there was a mirror in a toilet, with a neat and fit Sam Fisher reflection. Nice little touch.
Posted by: snarf | June 12, 2006 at 11:55
The Sims 2 has this as well.
It's a very neat feature but apparently hard to produce, which is why many games don't bother. I once read an article on a formula 1 game where they talked about how long they spent just showing up the cars on a big screen ,TV coverage style, to make it more lifelike.
Posted by: Tom | June 12, 2006 at 13:39
Doom 3 does it as well, though not nearly as well as the graphic you're showing.
Posted by: sloane | June 12, 2006 at 15:24
Real-time mirrors have been around for a while - I seem to remember seeing them in games as old as Max Payne.
The mirrors in EQ2 are pretty cruddy. They have a delayed update, and use a fairly low resolution software renderer (check out how bad the image is when all your graphics settings are at maximum). Bit of a cop-out considering that they're very small and only used in environments that have very little going on in terms of complexity.
Posted by: Seb Potter | June 12, 2006 at 17:35
Though compared to no mirrors in every other MMO, they are frakking neat. Its amazing what you can do to trick out a home in EQ2.
Posted by: Aluvius | June 12, 2006 at 20:29
I was once chatting with a guy who was writing for a text-based MMORPG, who was implementing a mirror. He wanted something more interesting than just "You see a mirror", so we discussed maybe having it work like:
"You see Bob, Jane, a table, a chest, a mirror, a chest, a table, Jane, and Bob".
Eg, everything reflected in the mirror.
The fun this allowed then would be that in *haunted* mirrors, you'd sometimes see things reflected that weren't really there.
"You see Bob, Jane, a table, a chest, a mirror, a chest, a table, Jane, a walking skeleton, and Bob"
Posted by: Alaric Snell-Pym | June 13, 2006 at 10:56
In Gemstone 3 (a text based game) a mirror was a rare find too now that I think of it.
Posted by: Aluvius | June 13, 2006 at 16:49
I believe DDO has reflective mirrors, at least in the very first dungeon you go into! But it doesn't have housing, so I'm not sure it actually counts. ;)
Posted by: Sjofn | June 13, 2006 at 22:07
Sooner there are relfective mirrors in SL the better.
Though it might crash the grid. It will crash the grid.
Posted by: Cris | June 14, 2006 at 09:46
I must say it's a bit odd to see this being discussed. The original Unreal had accurate mirrors, if you can do full reflections in rippling water then the various techniques to do flat mirror reflections can't be that tricky. Are they just very uncommon in MMOs for some reason?
Posted by: Pixel Kill | June 17, 2006 at 14:08