[Micky C]

I decided to take another crack at figuring out how to use the ROR system that TX coded a while back, and I had more success than in the past. (I figured out you need to use the mirror texture to make a clear 'window' but you can use levels of transparency with normal textures to make them partially see through.)

With this knowledge I took the bar in the strip club from e1l2 Red Light District, copied it, flipped the sectors, textures and sprites (I did it manually but if there's an easier way of doing it, an explanation would be helpful), and used the ROR on the floor of the original and the ceiling of the inverted copy to make a kind of mirrored floor effect. Obviously I had to take out a number of sprites which are hardcoded to drop and do other various things. Now I know I don't have it perfect, there are a few glitches, (such as a respawn sprite which shouldn't appear in game showing up in the floor) and one or two other things which may or may not be due to my implementation of the ROR.

Anyway I thought it was interesting enough to make a thread about to discuss this, and possibly other ways to make use of the ROR or new features/increased stability that could be added to it. Note that if you share hi-tags with doors, even the movement of the doors will appear reflected! Another point of interest is that you don't need to have an SE 40 in every sector to make it have the ROR effect.

Here are some screenshots, and I've attached the map so that others can look at it and mess around with it. Use software mode because in Polymost my framerate hits rock bottom and I'm forced to quit. That might just be me though.

And for those who don't know, I believe the SE 40 produces the ROR effect, and SE 46s are needed to have other sectors included when rendering the ROR.

Attached File(s)

•  mirrorfloor.zip (14.34K)
  Number of downloads: 284

[CruX]

Cool beans

[Spirrwell]

That looks pretty damn good, awesome job.

[High Treason]

It never occured to me that other people would not immediately realise you had to use a mirror tile to make a clear window.

Something worth noting is that sloped surfaces are not always properly rendered in RoR, this stands for the other Build games too, though Blood can handle it reasonably well compared with the other games when using certain exploits... Might try and put one last Blood map out.

[Hendricks266]

Cool. NWL6 has a similar effect, but instead of ROR, they used flat sprites in the middle of a sector. =/

[Micky C]

I remember that, it looked ok and has a lot of the same limitations as this kind of mirrored floor, but this allows for much more complicated geometry around the actual 'floor' area (if anyone can be bothered doing it). Of course a MUCH better solution would be having Plagman get around to implementing a user-end way of incorporating mirrored surfaces in polymer

[High Treason]

SW has the RoR fake reflections effect in... I think it was called "Great Escape" but I could be wrong, it is a Prison level, the one before Floating Fortress (The SW equivalent of Derelict) right in the last room, there were trash cans and stuff in there too, destroying one destroyed the one in the reflection, not sure how they did that, though I know I copied the effect once.

SW had a useful tile next to the mirror, it was called No-Draw, the was invaluable when creating certain effects, though you still used the mirror tile for RoR and Wall Stacks (Well, the portal things).

Edit: What happens if enemies enter that room? In SW they used to fall through the floor. Incidentally, in SW you still used the mirror texture on the RoR Floor/Ceiling and then used an ST1 sprite (Like the SE sprite) to add a "Floor/Ceiling Mask" which was neat.

[Micky C]

The reflection is a completely separate room with downwards gravity (i.e if you put a weapon sprite in it it would fall to the 'ceiling') so if an enemy walked in there you wouldn't see a reflection because there wouldn't be an enemy in the other sector. If you grab the key card or break some bottles, the reflections remain unchanged. Although if you wanted you could have some spritework with the same hi-tag so that if you blew it up with an explosive the spritework in the 'reflection' would explode as well.

So if anyone who downloaded the map manages anything better than what I did, feel free to share it
Maybe if one of the eduke32 developers can try to minimize the glitches from certain angles and other things, they can include it as an official part of the ror.map

[High Treason]

I know how it works, I was referring to the upper room (The one you usually walk in) - I was just curious as to wether enemies could walk in the upper room, despite the fact they will not reflet. In SW you had to disallow the enemies from walking on reflective floors, because they would fall through the floor to the "reflected" ceiling, luckily the system was designed with this in mind so you could add an ST1 that prevented enemies entering the sector (as if they had hit an invisible wall).