Mirrors are easy to construct. But if it's made improperly, it will look very ugly.
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.
Make the red line of the 'behind the mirror' sector a one-sided 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,SoundToPlay]
.
If you want Duke to say "Damn, I'm lookin' good" when you press on the
mirror, give SoundToPlay a value of 252. In the game, mirrors reflect
shrink rays, and can be blown up with explosives. 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 for 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 sex 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
,
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. This is because mirrors were believed to work only if the
'behind the mirror' sector was at least as large as the room to
display. That may have actually been true, and I'm unsure of what
exactly happened that suddenly caused mirrors to work under different
circumstances. If I had to guess, I would say the error only existed in
v1.3d of the game.
One-Way Mirrors
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 (#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
having problems with a mirror. First construct a regular mirror, then
press 1
on the mirror texture
to make it disappear. Now connect the 'behind the mirror' sector back
to the wall it stems from (essentially collapsing it). Technically, the
mirror texture is still active, meaning that the wall where the mirror
used to be will still reflect shrink rays! You can texture it however
you like. Note that if you press 1
below the texture, the mirror texture will reappear and it will still work in the game!