Exclusive Look: Mirrors in Paralives (Patreon)

Hi there, happy Friday!

Have you ever been in a house that doesn't have any mirrors? Me neither! In many games, mirrors are not essential but in a life sim like Paralives, they play an important role for decorating your rooms and for making your characters do all sort of interactions with them. That's why I wanted to tell you a bit more about mirrors in Paralives today!

Mirror Showcase  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

Let's begin this post by showcasing a few of the mirrors that are already in the game. A lot more mirrors of all styles and shapes will be created later.

On the left, we have round mirrors that can be scaled up or down. On the right, another round mirror but with a little shelf to place small objects on.

Just like with the picture frames, you can select the frame of this resizable mirror.

We are working from home right now but when we get an office after the pandemic, it would be really cool to have a Paralives mirror like that in our lobby! On the right, simple mirrors with a thin border and a round top.

How Mirrors Work Behind the Scenes  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

Most games do not have working mirrors in them because they are actually somewhat tricky to create. When you play a game, it has to refresh your whole screen around 60 times per second in order to make it run smoothly. Each of these times, your computer has to recalculate each pixel of your screen depending on the angle of your in-game camera and the objects you are looking at. That's millions of pixels to calculate faster than you can blink!

When you add a mirror object inside your house, in addition to calculating the image on your screen from the point of view of your camera, the game also has to calculate another image. This time, it's from the point of view of the mirror object, in order to display the reflected image properly on the mirror surface.

If you add multiple mirrors inside your house, your computer will have a lot of work to do and the game could slow down quite noticeably. However, we made many optimizations to avoid slow downs like that such as lowering the resolution and quality of the image displayed on mirror surfaces if they are far away. We can now add many of them in a single room without any issues!

Creating a new Mirror Object to Add to the Game  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

As you know, Paralives will offer tools allowing modders to easily add their own objects to the game. If you have a bit of knowledge on how to create 3D objects using a software like Maya, Blender or 3ds Max, you could create pretty much any furniture or object and add it to the game to play with it.

Here's a breakdown showing how I created one of the mirror object using Blender, a free 3D modelling software. If you think that's cool, I strongly encourage you to download Blender and to give it a shot! There are a lot of great video tutorials on YouTube that will help you get started with it.

• 1 - Start with a simple cylinder. Choose carefully the amount of faces that the cylinder will have. If there are too few, the cylinder will appear blocky. If there are too many, the object will be more detailed and your computer will have to work a bit more to load the object and display it in the game. Having a lot of objects with unnecessary details would make the game run less smoothly on your computer in the end.
• 2 - Flatten the cylinder. In this case, I want my mirror to be about 1 centimeter thick.
• 3 - Delete the bottom half of the cylinder. Only the top of my mirror is round.
• 4 - Stretch down the bottom of the half cylinder. My mirror is now close to the final shape
• 5 - Add a thin border to the mirror. There, we have our mirror. Done!

Now, we need to export the object in a file format that the game can read. Then, using the modding tools, we are able to integrate this mirror to the game, choosing extra details like the name, the price, the color swatches, the tags to determine where the mirror appears in the furniture catalog menu, etc.

Mirror Interactions in Live Mode  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

All these talks about mirrors make me wonder: what interactions would you like to see in Paralives on mirror objects? Are there specific actions you would like your Paras to be able to do in front of a mirror? Tell us in the comments!

Cheers,

Alex