Tiens on 5/12/2012 at 04:59

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[CENTER]Mirror or Interactive Reflection in TDS:[/CENTER]

Let me put your attention to some very interesting illusion, that could be easily made in any T3 FM. I'm talking about an "interactive reflection" with working emitters and objects, that hide or appear because of player's actions. I've already made it in "The Cabal - Furious Flames", and it looks like this:

[CENTER]http://darkfate.org/view/details/files/fan-missions/thief3/cabal/furious_flames/screenshots/screen005.jpg[/CENTER]

And here's my two-years-old testing map with some kind of Kurshok Palace. With a bit rework, idea of "interactive reflection" looks like this:

[CENTER]http://i48.tinypic.com/33yt43n.jpg

http://i47.tinypic.com/2qvgnqc.jpg

http://i45.tinypic.com/34fzf9i.jpg[/CENTER]

Sorry, I didn't write any tutorial or explanation about it before, because I thought people already understood the way to create this illusion. By the way, even if I'm the first one, who created the so-called "interactive reflection" for TDS FM, this idea is not new and is not mine. As far as I see, the same method was used in some other video games and a few fan-missions for T2.

I admit, that the idea was too raw, while I was making "The Cabal FF". Even my own testers divided into two groups: 1) "Wah! It's mirror! Cool to see a mirror in T3!" and 2) "What? This strange delusion is a mirror? I'm not impressed, sorry." Anyway, this idea is fruitful. And the "space after the looking glass" could be totally interactive: thanks to the custom scripts, any emitters/lights/objects could appear/destroy in the same moment, their "originals in the real world" do so. As you see, almost anything could be mirrored, except Garrett/Garrett's weapon/NPCs. Of cause, any NPC could be placed "inside the mirror", but the FM creator will have big problems with synchronization of "mirroring" it.

This illusion is easy to create. Also this technics of illusion works better as a huge water pool than as a mirror on a wall. In reality we have a space (made of two rooms) composed of three main parts:

1) the first room - talking about a pool it's the upper one - where the player can run.
2) the second room - a lower one - a reversed at 180 degrees room (a copy of the upper one) with all the objects placed into mirrored positions (even fire emitters etc).
3) a flat mesh with half-transparent water texture on it - in the middle between the rooms, as some kind of a floor surface for the upper room.

Here's the way it looks in the T3Ed:

[CENTER]http://i48.tinypic.com/155kiti.jpg[/CENTER]