Hi, This isn’t a actual issue, however, i couldn’t find much related to reflections, specifically about how they perform and consume memory, there is no complains over reflectances about lag/weird behavior, but i plan to use them in a specific manner.
I’ve created a bunch of simple vector-window that are looped with textures, the whole unique brick containing windows on all sides is a reflectance, reflecting a custom-skybox, to make it feels pretty detailed and dynamic with the lowerest voxel count possible.
Now my questions are the following :
Most of the reflectance is covered, but is the behavior exactly the same as without texture?
Buildings are basically very large bricks, is it bad that bricks over 50x50x50 size is reflected?
(see .GIF below) This building is more detailed with actual parts, but uses only 1 part as a window & also reflect the skybox, once again, is it consuming to spam it that way ?
Yes. The texture just overlays the brick. The reflectance of the object won’t be affected in any way, aside from you only being able to see reflections in open areas of the texture.
Don’t think it should. I don’t quite know how reflectance works internally but I assume that rendering is part of making reflectance work. With that in mind, parts with reflectance may be more expensive than parts without. I’m thinking about this in the same way that transparent parts are taken out from rendering and that translucent parts are more rendering intensive than not.
Shouldn’t be. Look on the bright side: less rendering work and less instances involved. At least you aren’t putting a reflectance block in every grid of a single window or a block per whole window. It’s probably also much easier to maintain this way since you catch all windows by modifying that one brick.
I’m not incredibly versed in the semantics of reflectance but I know enough to give you a broad understanding.
Reflectance = Reflects the static Skybox, meaning it doesn’t have to render anything through or near it like transparent parts, so it’s not too bad to begin with.
Integration = I believe, and correct me if I’m wrong, if a player’s performance is poor they can turn down the graphics settings and reflectance will auto disable.
Conclusion
It’s not too unoptimized to begin with, but use everything in moderation, this’ll improve your game stylistically and performantly.
FYI, Quality doesn’t change anything regarding reflections, and as a very long user (until this year) of Low-tier PC (i3s), i believe this was always the case even on the lowerest quality
I did always assumed it was consuming nothing until now, but it’s a unique thing afterall, i’m very curious of the difference between a non-reflected one, is there any way i could eventually be able to compare it somehow?
I honestly didn’t know that, haven’t really overused or extensively used the reflective properties. When it comes to consumption, I’m not sure how you’d quantify it unless you check every since stat on the microprofiler.
I personally don’t think it’d make such a heavy impact if you use it in moderation however, it’s just reflecting the static skybox and the time of day also changes how it reflects.I personally don’t think it’ll make a huge difference but I’ll eventually do some stress testing and I’ll share with you any information or significant performance drops if I do find any.
You don’t need to worry about reflectance. Unless you’re literally making every part reflective, if you’re experiencing frame rate drop there’s tons of other things you should be trying to change first, such as just trying to reduce overall part and polygon count, using fewer transparent parts, or reducing particle effects. In fact even if every part was reflective, I doubt it would make much difference.
Reflectance also has no effect on the server, the server doesn’t need to render anything.
