Just an idea...screenshots as bzflag textures.

[TD-Linux]

Can there be a miror texture?

No, mirrors are mainly a raytracing thing. There are ways to 'fake' mirrors, but they all involve rendering the scene twice, which halves your framerate. If you want a fake mirror in BZFlag right now, just flip your scene and put a transparent wall in between. You could make the transparent wall slightly tinted and shiny to make it seem more like a mirror.

[person1]

u guys lost the point.

[JeffM]

TD-Linux
mirrors are NOT just a raytracing thing. There are a couple of fast ways to do them, with out redrawing the entire scene again. Many games have done it ( quake 3 for one ). Any portal system could do them easy. Shaders can do it as well.

[The Purple Panzer]

Why not allow active, live views from other places in the map to be used as textures?

This would:
1. let you see where you're going to teleport to, if there is a teleporter at the surface;
2. let you set up monitoring points, places where you could see panes of live screenshots from around the map - a good place to spot STs from, which would be especially nice on large meps;
3. A way to implement mirrors with limited computation;
4. A way to achieve what you want, as you could create a texture that represents (shows) some other part of the map.

I'd posted a related idea on the enhancements list, to allow textures to be 'live' with external imagery or text. In its most general form, you might be able to reach across servers to show live (observer-like) views from them.

[Mostly Harmless!]

You could set up a security camera area. That would be nice with CTF, and would probably inspire teamwork to distract the cameras while an ST tries to cap.