I did manage to workout a nice little PS 1.4 heat blur effect based loosly on the old ATI caves demo. There can be some slight artifacts sometimes but for it's simplicity I'm happy.
Here's the result...
Ok I must admit that the flame looking effect in those screenshots is the result of re-using the old frames buffer, and the bloom effect together :-D
I wish my fire looked that good...but that's one thing I'm working on. It doens't look like that anymore...I don't have any new screens...it just looks like a sheet of plasma now [as it should].
Basically I use 2 scrolling distortion texture samples and a mask texture. It's a pretty basic effect...the red channel offsets the X, and the green channel offsets on the Y texcoords. I have to scale the values a lot inside the shader, by 0.04 to calm the effect down.
Here is a image showing the human gib models....they don't look that cool in this screenshot, but trust me in-game with blood flying everywhere they look just fine :-D And I'm going overboard with blood lol, think carmagedden times 10.. >:-D I also have ragdoll effects for when the explosion is pretty close but the person doesn't get gibbed.
For the vehicle explosions I already have the vehicles subdivided into about 20 groups so that makes breaking it up into gibs pretty easy. I only have 2 types of gibs ingame now...burning metal, and human body parts. I've got flames/fire on all the vehicle parts...once I add the heat blur and some high res explosions textures I just got....things will look great.
I will have a video, of this soon enough [grin]
On the gameplay front I've added shotcuts for the orders, as well as some other things. These next 2 days will be spent finishing up the order functionality, and I have some easy pathfinding fixed to implement among other things...
Also I created a cool globe type thing for the plazas...
Ok that's it for now.
- Dan
