Did anyone ever figure out a way to get a functional mirror in-game? The armor in http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10505 is pretty shiny, but I believe I had read somewhere that it's actually an optical illusion instead of a real reflection...

That's correct - the reflection is a single picture file that is used so the shiny armor indoors will still reflect the outdoor scene if you use the OB default image (not sure if Lost Paladins uses the same image or one they replaced it with) but there is no way to constantly change the image to show an actual reflection - so no there is still no way to add a working mirror to the game.

Hmm... I wonder if it would be possible to use the same principle behind the Bruma statue to show a facsimile of your character somehow (like in a painting). I'll have to learn waaaaaay more about scripting before I can figure that one out, though.

you would have to 'fake it' by making the room in reverse on the other side of the mirror, then scripting an NPC (that looks like the player) so move with the player's actions....

not easy and will look dodgy no matter how you do it...

I remember thinking it was awesome when Duke Nukem 3d had functioniong mirrors in the bathroom... and that was back in 1996. I can't believe in these modern times Oblivion can't manage to do it.

Mirrors were new back then, so everyone used them.

Given how true mirrors require re-rendering the world, effectively doubling the load, and with games becoming more detailed and otherwise graphically demanding, continuing to use mirrors was impractical.

Haha. And Oblivion barely runs as it is just rendering things once.

A shader should be able to do it. We use custom shaders that process each pixel in the screen already. It shouldn't tax the game any more than that. Unfortunately, I'm not adept at the shader language (HLSL) and am not a mesh/texture artist. So, I wouldn't know where to begin in regards to creating an actual mirror with a texture that uses a custom HLSL file. Come to think of it, this may not be possible. I've only done full-screen shaders in a couple of my mods.

EDIT: Actually, this won't work. A reflection is a reflection - a reverse copy of what you see - not a copy of what's on screen. Sorry. Nothing to see here. Continue on your way...

Consider this a layman's thought:

The Oblivion water has some (imperfect) mirror effect. Could it's rendering/display method reused to get mirror-ing off objects? Sorry if stupid thought.

Hmm, maybe an overlay of water could be applied to an object and then set the physics to be the same as the underlying object with regards to collisions...

Not sure how one would really go about implementing that, though.

I'll play around with that idea and let you know if I get anywhere with it...

Because it has more to render then the average game of its time. Not to mention the AI processing was/is demanding as hell. Individual AI is very taxing for any game that uses it.

I read in a thread on LOD meshes that the water renders the LOD, not the normal mesh, which makes sense given that Oblivion's water reflection is not that high res to begin with. An OBGE plugin which takes the scene post-render, flips it, and applies it to a surface would sound like a better bet, but I don't know if that's even possible in Oblivion. I mean, how would you define that property on the Nif?

The more I attempt this the more I see why no one has done it yet. This is some difficult stuff. I also thought about http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6895, but that method seems way too "interactive" for my purposes.

Maybe something leveraging this? http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=18905

If you could get the OBGE Liquid Water shader to run the reflections and make a special water type for it that has no ripples and a highly reflective surface perhaps it would work.

You would also have to turn it upside down wouldn't you?

No idea, I've not tried to exploit a water plane for this purpose before.