Second Life Mirrors… Really!?!

If you haven’t realized, we do not have mirrors in SL. The reason is the rendering load they can add. If the Lindens added mirrors someone would add a fun-house mirror room. The region performance would likely drop to 1 frame per minute or possibly per hour.

But, we do have ways to fake mirrors. Those I’ve seen are awkward. But, this portal thing is one of the neatest mirror tricks I’ve seen in a long time.

You’ll have to turn the volume up to hear Adeon.

But, this is just way too neat. Be sure to give the video a thumbs up.

4 thoughts on “Second Life Mirrors… Really!?!

  1. The region wouldn’t take a hit at all. The region wouldn’t even care as it is not affected by mirrors. Only the client will have a performance impact and as proven on multiple occasions already the impact is not big enough to justify not implementing it. We had mirrors already (although not working in Deferred Rendering), we have mirrors working on water, we have Screen Space Reflections which although are a very expensive way of faking cheap reflections (doing proper reflections would be faster and would reflect everything properly) and although static we do have projectors which can be used to fake mirrors. This is neither new nor special and is primarily used to fill in the hole that is the still missing ability to add cubemaps to have at least some kind of environmental reflections, although static but slightly better looking and MUCH much cheaper than putting 6 projectors all around in a cube shape, besides it causing problems with shadows (since only 2 of them can cast a shadow) which is another issue that i’d like to lessen by adding a checkbox to disable shadows from single chosen projectors. I’m still just waiting for LL do come towards me and tell me that i can finally start working on getting it into the LL Viewer.

    • All the excuses we are given as to why we don’t have mirrors on nonsense. We had mirrors in Unreal Engine 20 years ago. Also, there’s no reason why mirrors would need to reflect other mirrors. Or at least give the user the option to set how many reflections are rendered. We already have perfect reflections in water if you set it up right, why we can’t apply that to a surface is beyond me. I think they simply haven’t gotten around to it.

      • They either don’t want to or don’t believe its possible.

        I’m leaning towards the the latter as like you said we had mirrors in game 20 years ago and continue to have them now without any detrimental effect on gameplay, so adding the feature into SL shouldn’t be a problem.

        Hell I don’t see why today we still have sim crossing issues or for that matter the big list of issues that we still seem to have that other online game don’t.

        • The Lindens know it is possible. They simply believe there is no way to add mirrors and defend against what griefers would do with them.

          I know of no other game where characters of complexity and diverse sets of attachments and programmed scripts move from shard to shard (regions in SL jargon). Which game are you thinking is an example of that?

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