[article] Reflective Surfaces

This is a discussion topic for the article "Reflective Surfaces" by Perin which can be found here

Article description:

This is a good method to have a reflective surface in Half-Life

I never thought about doing that. Would be cool though if the player could see themself.

Tis not possible in the HL engine skeletor. Good tutorial nontheless.

nice, i've done reflections before. only thing i'd like to know
is it possible to get doors to mover in the "reflection" with scripts or not?

This was on VERC a while ago, but the tut there wasn't really good. I love this one. Clean, simple, and the effect is awesome.

An additional problem is that, in singleplayer, monsters will not be reflected. There is a way to solve this, described in the VERC article, though it's not quite perfect (the monsters' left/right won't match with their reflection). If you really need perfect monster reflections, there's always Spirit of Half-Life.

If you name the doors the same thing and have a trigger multiple infront of them targetting the door then it'll open both of them. A problem could come though from blocking the door when it closes and simply wacking up the damage so it crushes the player wouldn't be a good idea witha simply wooden door I guess you could just make it not close though. Mmm.

Oh yeah, nice tut.

great tut Perin =)

Lovely. The only thing is that the room is a little complex and beginners may have trouble with the hammer screenshots. My, it is beautiful though..

Another good "two door open" method would be to make both doors one by grouping them and making both of them the same func_door entity. that would prevent the door reflection from closing and the other not due to the player/monster blocking it But this would only work with a swinging door. But other then all that its a good tit.

Good tutorial. Simple and easy to read. For those wanting reflective monsters, the only REAL way is using Spirit of half-life, where even animations reflect correctly for reflective floors.

is this really the best way to make a reflective surface? wouldnt this lag a level if it were done too much? kinda doubles everything you do. good tut though, looks cool.

@ sinner ... I think its the most simple way to do this ... you better don't use this technique in large, open area's (big halls, lobby's, etc ...), but for corridors and stuff, it's OK.

If you want to show the reflection of an opening/closing door, either just make a new door in the reflection with the same name, or make both into one entity if it's hinged.

Another thing is that you need to add any prefabs you use to both the upside down bit and the player area. So its best to finnish the room totaly before atempting this. Good one though.

i remember seeing in bleu shift a mirrored room wiht mirrored persons

@ pepper the architexture the same as done here, but the scientists done different. i think to dp this you make a duplicate, take off smat edit, add in angles feild with values 0 0 180 and adjust position so their real and duplicates' feet touch or whatever and youve got a 'mirrored' scientist. Youll have to use scripts or Spirit if you want them to do the same thing

Yea, you make a scripted_sequence that moves with the normal scientist and get a mirrored scientist to head towards it and kepp going to it.

anyway, good tut

That is really clever! I think I'm going to try this as soon as I get home!

Pretty cool, but the floor is fullbright. Is there any way to fix this?