In some cases they can look really good and I think in some cases they can look better than simple dynamic reflections. Maybe you could keep dynamic reflections for mirrors and stuff and use SSR for everything else.
One of the main things as well is then cars can reflect off of themselves. So you could see the reflection of your taillights in your shiny chrome bumper.
My takeaway from this: -The game counts UI as part of the reflected environment -SSR is taken a bit literally -Grid Small Pure is apparently shiny as fuck
The state of the art for this is ray-tracing, which afaik CryEngine 3 Torque3D doesn't support out of the box. It's also like using a windblower to clean up your room IMO, a bit of an extreme solution. For the specific use-case of rear-view mirrors, Planar Reflections requires you re-render the world from the player camera's position + rotation as reflected in the mirror, but you get perfect reflection fidelity. The ETS games use this for side mirrors. SSR is a close-relative technology to SSAO ("Ambient Occlusion"), and BeamNG has this effect, I don't have much doubt that SSR could be implemented by the developers if they so wished. --- Post updated --- Also, implementing SSR directly into the engine is not the same as installing ReShade in BeamNG and enabling an SSR shader. BeamNG.drive has something that ReShade can't access and is very important for SSR; a material's roughness. This is basically a value that tells the lighting system how blurry a given material's reflections are. Reshade can't differentiate between the roughness of a road and a mirror, because it only has access to color and depth. Meanwhile, BeamNG does have access to the roughness of materials. It would be significant for BeamNG to implement SSR with variable roughness. (or at least disable SSR on rough surfaces where reflections would be too noisy but then we have to dive into the question of also implementing Temporal Anti-Aliasing and that's a whole can of worms I want opened in a different post etc.)
