Does RTX get the team any closer to figuring out a solution to the lack of reflective surfaces or mirrors in the game?
TL;DRRay tracing is the only sensible way to get true mirror reflections, though simple cases like a single mirror could be done by re-rendering the scene, which the team has considered but handheld mirrors would be too costly.
We have plenty of shiny surfaces in the game, but I gather they mean full-on mirror reflection, really, really clean. For true mirror-like surfaces, ray tracing is the only sensible way to solve that problem. There's no real alternative. There are, however, much simpler solutions for bespoke cases. There are many games where you've seen a water reflection or a single mirror, a typical mirror, and they can be handled just by rendering the scene again from a different perspective, usually at lower quality or some kind of compromise to stop it halving the performance. And they're quite viable, and we would probably consider doing that, especially because it's quite simple. And for the mirror case, it's a nice, easy way to work. It does require just a little bit of constraint from the artists not to do like a hall of mirrors. You put a mirror in a bathroom, and when we've told art to test this in the past, they'll do it, and then behind the bathroom there'll be like a bungalow or something. And you're like, no, please put the mirror in a [sensible] location.
It's why you can never give players a handheld mirror. It'll just become a nightmare.
Yeah, I mean, you could, but you would just halve the performance, literally, of the game. And although you'd hope a handheld mirror would be smaller, some parts of the engine will not be able to scale down. So the number of pixels will be less, so that's great, you'll save on something. But there'll be certain aspects of the game that will not scale down. If it's just a tenth of the screen size, it doesn't mean it'll cost 10 times less. It might still cost like 50%. So who wants to take a 50% frame rate hit to have a handheld mirror? And if you've played any racing games which have rearview mirrors, you'll always see the lower quality they get in the rearview mirrors. Or they have such a bespoke engine to manage that, and that's a core feature. Unfortunately, we've got an extremely complicated game before we consider mirrors. But for small mirrors, you'd probably just render the scene flipped. That is something we've been considering. There hasn't been a really strong need for it, but there were some needs from some departments asking for it, which is all I'll say there. But when you get to the fully general case, like seeing your reflection in a spaceship's curved surface, ray tracing is the only real answer there.