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Posted by: Homeboyd903
Posted by: BOB570
Posted by: Homeboyd903
Posted by: BOB570
Do you have any idea just how much power that would take to have a bunch of mirrors? Real time reflections take massive amounts of power, which the 360 doesn't have. There would probably be a limit of 1 or 2 if they implemented this.
No. Do you? Really?
Yes. And yes.
Sorry if I came off as an -blam!- with my first response. I never really re-read it and I just realized how condescending I sounded.
No its all good. Im glad to have someone here who is knowledgeable of game engines... because I am not. So I have a few questions.
1) What about the Halo: Reach game engine would not allow for this to work?
2) What about the Xbox360 would not allow this to work?
3) Can it work on other consoles?
4) Why would 1 or 2 work but not more?
Raise the topic from the dead!
1) The Reach engine will be extremely similar to the halo 3 engine, but sadly it is still bound by the xbox 360 console which every game engine that runs on the 360 is bound by. Short answer: there probably won't be any significant enough differences in the new engine to allow for something too complex.
2) The xbox 360 has a triple core processor running at (from memory, which may be wrong) 3.0GHz each. The graphics card on the 360 isn't too impressive and the render cache is extremely small. All in all the 360 sucks by today's standards. As I did state earlier, the 360 is capable of handling reflections such as the reflections found in halo 3 water.
3) The only console massive amounts of real time, all world reflecting, full screen mirrors would conceivably work on is a computer at this time. A rather powerful computer at that.
4) For every mirror you add, you cause the system (CPU, RAM, GPU, etc) work harder. Every component in the system has its limits. Halo 3 pushes those limits almost to the max. Ever wonder why you can play 4 player multi-player on a single xbox but can only play 2 player campaign on a single xbox? That is because rendering a massive world (such as campaign) is too much for the poor little 360 to handle.
Theoretically this means that you could have 3 nearly full screen, all world reflecting mirrors on screen in multi-player at the same time. However that also means you can only have 1 person on a single xbox playing multi-player. Think of a mirror as adding an extra player to the game. For every mirror the entire world (not gonna go into technical details about occlusion optimization) has to be rendered. Another way to think about this is that every mirror added, the game will run twice as slow. So with 1 mirror the game will be 1/2 the speed it would normally run at (assuming this is a full quality mirror). 2 mirrors would be 1/3 as fast and 3 mirrors would be 1/4 as fast.
Of course tons of optimizations can be made such as occlusion, smaller render target sizes, lesser detailed models, less detailed environment, no post processing (I think that one is a given for now), single mirror reflection (no mirror mirrors another mirror), etc.
Long story short: it is possible to add mirrors into the Halo engine whether it be Reach, ODST (which it won't since that is all ready completed), or a future Halo engine. It's up to Bungie to put forth the effort and it is ultimately up to Bungie to decide if it is worth it or not.