Amazing interview (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, March 03, 2016, 20:39 (3193 days ago) @ ZackDark
edited by uberfoop, Thursday, March 03, 2016, 20:51

Didn't Halo 1 cheat by mirroring the entire world on those planar surfaces, though?

I'm not sure as to the exact implementation details, but Halo 1 definitely doesn't simply have a flipped copy of the world existing in the same rendering space as everything else. That just plain wouldn't work on the control room catwalk where you can see below the reflecting surface, and (I'd have to check again what it looks like) I think there'd be occlusion issues on the transparent surfaces in Silent Cartographer if they were simply rendering flipped transparent objects.

H3 would use actual reflections instead.

"Actual reflections" is nebulous. The implementation of real-time cubemaps is often very similar to "proper" planar reflections, and the results are technically less precise, since parallax makes the cubemap less correct the farther you get from its rendering point (although this doesn't cause significant issues when the reflecting object is tiny relative to the space it's in, such as helmet visors).