Navigate InfoSuite
Hosted At
Link to DNR
Advanced Effects - Walls - B2 : Mirrors

Mirrors

Mirrors reflect everything in a sector, including the player. They are easy to construct, but if made improperly they will look very ugly.



Standard Mirror


Create a room. Attach a small sector to the side of the room. This sector will be the 'behind-the-mirror' sector. The two-sided (red) wall will be the actual mirror. The size of the 'behind-the-mirror' sector is irrelevant, but it's necessary that you at least have a 'behind-the-mirror' sector.


Set the red line of the 'behind-the-mirror' sector as a solid one-sided masked wall (with the 1 key) and give it the MIRROR texture (#560). Make the mirror blocked and hittable with the B and H keys (B and Ctrl + H in 2D mode). Optionally, you could tag the mirror texture [0,MirrorSound]. If you want Duke to say "Damn, I'm lookin' good!" when you press on the mirror, give MirrorSound a value of 252.


In the game, mirrors reflect shrink rays, and can be blown up with explosives. Note that mirrors will be destroyed by explosives regardless of blocking/hitscan flags, but they still must be set to prevent the player from walking through the mirror. When a mirror is destroyed, it displays the texture MIRRORBROKE. You may notice that the broken mirror texture is not properly aligned. To fix this, temporarily swap the MIRROR texture with MIRRORBROKE (#70), align it however you want, then swap it back to the MIRROR texture.


Note: If two mirrors can see each other it will cause problems, and mirrors can often see each other through just about anything (walls, rooms, etc). If two washrooms are close together (and by logic most non-unisex types would be, unless the owner of the institution really has it in for the opposite gender and stowed their washroom somewhere well hidden and then giggled incessantly), often one of the two mirrors will have troubles. If you check E4L2.MAP: "Duke-Burger", you'll discover that one of the two mirrors is MIA. You may also notice that the 'behind-the-mirror' sectors in the official maps are bloody enormous. I think this was because mirrors would only work if the 'behind-the-mirror' sector was at least as large as the room to display. I'm unsure of what exactly happened that suddenly caused mirrors to work under different circumstances, but if I had to guess, I would say this limitation only existed in v1.3d of the game.




One-Way Mirror


One-Way Mirrors are those classic interrogation room mirrors which only reflect on one side (check the mirror in TUTORIAL.MAP for an example). Simply construct a hallway looping around to a room behind your mirror, and connect that room to the 'behind-the-mirror' sector. Mask unbreakable transparent glass such as (#504) on the other side of the 'behind-the-mirror' sector, and make it blocked and hittable. To hide the HOM effect, turn grid locking off (with L), and make the 'behind-the-mirror' sector as thin as possible. The only downside to this effect is that the mirror can be broken with explosives, which ruins the realism entirely once the player realizes they can see through wooden panels from the back side.




Shrink Ray Sensitive Walls


This is a neat little trick I accidentally discovered while testing a mirror. If you press 1 on a completed mirror to make it disappear, the mirror's attributes will still technically be active. This means that it will still reflect shrink rays! If you make the 'behind-the-mirror' sector as thin as possible, it creates the illusion that the wall texture behind the invisible mirror is actually reflective. You can texture this wall however you like.




Return to top