@jblackwell @glitchered thank you for your posts! These are great insights that give me some serious “stuff” to think about.
The long and short of it is: I will be wanting crystal materials like this in the game, and they can take up a large amount of screen space. From the worldbuilding of the setting the game is in, there simply are moments where these absolutely silly-large crystals dominate the view. That’s the vision.
I was messing around with one such crystal and noticing weird ways that the light and my own player model reflected and refracted through it, which was the reason for this post.
From a narrative, “feel” and artistic intent point of view, I absolutely cannot compromise on having these massive crystals in the scene. From a “playability” and player experience point of view (especially on, say, older hardware), I’d have to cut back on my expectations.
Writing custom solutions like back-to-front rendering or other solutions like you proposed is probably perfectly doable in the couple of scenes or so that we’ll want these stupidly-large crystals in, as long as we constrain the rest of the scene so there’s not too much going on there and allow the crystals all the “graphics budget” that I’d want them to have, emotionally at least.
This will be a fun challenge to tackle with some engineers. Thank you for your thoughts!