'A classic fake reflection where it's just the same room under a glass floor': I no longer trust my senses after reading this gamedev thread breaking down cost-effective graphical sorcery

Gordon Freeman illustration from wallpaper released for Half-Life's 25th anniversary rerelease.

(Image credit: Valve)

If you've ever trundled around on the back of a Warthog in the original Halo, you'll remember the way its tires seemed to melt into noisy blur as they got going. Turns out, there's no actual blur effect being applied—the game just swaps out a normal tire texture with one that looks hazy whenever the tires are spinning fast. It's economical, but effective.

That's the running theme with a thread game developer and designer on Weird West Joe Wintergreen started on Bluesky last Friday, which goes into some "cool cheap effects." The first is a ceiling fan shadow from Epic's VR shooter Robo Recall which isn't actually a shadow at all "or even a light function or even a decal," but its own "rotating translucent mesh."

speaking of cool cheap effects: the shadow from the ceiling fan in Robo Recall is not a real shadow or even a light function or even a decal, it's a rotating translucent mesh
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-08T16:46:16.797Z

He goes into all sorts of effects in the thread, like a "classic fake reflection" from Half-Life: Blue Shift "where it's just the same room under a glass floor," inverted to give the appearance of a sleek, reflective floor. Wintergreen notes, "Lots of old games did this, but [Unreal Engine 1] games didn't! Deus Ex had real reflections."

My favorite example Wintergreen showed off was from the Unreal Engine 4 mobile tech demo, where a swimming pool appears to distort the viewer's perspective as if underwater when submerged. But as he points out, "It's actually offsetting the actual verts down there in the shader. The underwater concrete is just literally wobbling."

meanwhile the Zen Garden ue4 mobile tech demo looks like the swimming pool has cool refraction shader stuff going on but it's actually offsetting the actual verts down there in the shader. the underwater concrete is just literally wobbling
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-08T16:46:16.838Z

The technical payoff of this stuff is a bit over my head as I don't make the games, I just play 'em, but it's still fascinating to see how an utterly convincing scene falls apart when viewed at just the right angle. Games only need to account for what the player can see, which is why Cyberpunk 2077 in third person has so many bizarre animation aberrations and why Banjo-Kazooie in ultra widescreen just looks wrong.

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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