"sswift: lighten up"
What? I'm offering suggestins how to make the effect better. What the heck is wrong with that. I said it looks cool. It can look better. I told you how. There is no "lightening up" to be done here.
"sswift: haven't you seen the reflective sphere demo on blitzcoder?"
Yes, I have. Why do you ask? That has nothing to do with this.
"It'll work on anything! And yes it is accurate."
How can you be so sure? Did you test it with different shapes of pool? For example, what if the pool is shaped like an H, and the camera in the center can't see the sides of the pool which are hidden by the arms it is between?
The effect looks great. I am only questioning how many situations it can be used in without graphical glitches.
It seems to me to be a kind of a hack which won't work right in every situation, though it is clearly preferable to spherical reflection maps, or nothing at all. I imagine that to get a better effect, one would need to be able to use stencil buffers, modify the camera's 3D transformation matrix, and use pixel/vertex shaders to distort the resulting flat mirror surface. Though pixel shaders I imagine wouldn't really work very well with a lot of surface displacement.
Anyhow, even if there's no graphical glitches with different shapes of pools, the reflection sitll isn't entirely accurate. You can't distort the image on a flat mirror and expect to get an image which looks exactly the same as the one you would get from a wavy mirror. But it will be close enough for games for now.
What? I'm offering suggestins how to make the effect better. What the heck is wrong with that. I said it looks cool. It can look better. I told you how. There is no "lightening up" to be done here.
"sswift: haven't you seen the reflective sphere demo on blitzcoder?"
Yes, I have. Why do you ask? That has nothing to do with this.
"It'll work on anything! And yes it is accurate."
How can you be so sure? Did you test it with different shapes of pool? For example, what if the pool is shaped like an H, and the camera in the center can't see the sides of the pool which are hidden by the arms it is between?
The effect looks great. I am only questioning how many situations it can be used in without graphical glitches.
It seems to me to be a kind of a hack which won't work right in every situation, though it is clearly preferable to spherical reflection maps, or nothing at all. I imagine that to get a better effect, one would need to be able to use stencil buffers, modify the camera's 3D transformation matrix, and use pixel/vertex shaders to distort the resulting flat mirror surface. Though pixel shaders I imagine wouldn't really work very well with a lot of surface displacement.
Anyhow, even if there's no graphical glitches with different shapes of pools, the reflection sitll isn't entirely accurate. You can't distort the image on a flat mirror and expect to get an image which looks exactly the same as the one you would get from a wavy mirror. But it will be close enough for games for now.