So, it only took me 3 hours, but I got my effect to work. Would have been easier if I didn't have to convert my whole system to use shaders and if I had more experience with shaders.

Screenie:


It doesn't animate to that and it does stop there. To be honest though, it doesn't look as cool as I thought it was going to and it requires shader 2.0 so I can't really keep it. Maybe I'll figure something else out. The time wasn't wasted though because I got some shader practice and I have radial blur code I could use in the future.

Now, on to per-pixel lightning and shadows.

-edit-
You may notice that I went back to one of the old hud designs. I felt that the one I had was really bulky and intrusive. What do you guys think?

Here's an image for reference:


Also, I got rid of the roundness of the rest of the GUI. I prefer the original design I had, so I went with it (slashed corners and rectangular buttons.)

11:04pm
Yea, I get to redesign a good chunk of my system. I went to switch objects over to shader rendering and my framerate dropped over 100.

12:18pm
Ok, I got my whole system converted to use shaders (if supplied.) It's still not as fast as it should be because I could only get it to work by hacking it together, but it still runs decently. If I need to, I'll completely rewrite it because no matter what, I'm getting this lighting in. I might leave shadows as they are though (part of the image.) We'll see.