Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Gratuitous Shield Effect

cliffski

I sneakily stuck in a new effect today as I was play testing. I used some cunning distortion shader cleverness to give a ripple effect to shield bubbles when they take incoming fire. You can see it happen here on a medium mech:

Looks really good in-motion, with everything else going on. It’s also effectively free, in performance terms due to the overhead of the shader pass happening anyway.

I’m currently tweaking a few variables, and improving a few minor things like this. Then I have the final manual, final performance optimisations etc, and then it’s pre-orders + beta. I’m looking forward to doing a few final trailer videos showing off the game in all it’s gratuitous explodey glory.

7 thoughts on Gratuitous Shield Effect

  3. its horribly involved, you need a shader, a fullscreen render target between the normal render target and the backbuffer, plus a distortion texture, and other fiddling.

  4. Hm, that is a bit low level for me :D. I’m still in flash. I understood what you said but for now I’m unable to make it happen. Thanks though :)

  5. That looks awsome, especially compared to the old effect. Makes you wonder what the whole battle would like like with that effect over it! :D

  7. It looks great, Cliff. I do have two suggestions though –

    Is it possible to have the effect “fall off” so that the entire sphere is not visible, but only the side that is hit – a sort of hybrid between your new effect and the old one? It wouldn’t need to be completely transparent on the back side of the hit, but it would look possibly less overwhelming if it was a little more directional than it is now…

    And secondly, is it possible to increase the “ripples”? At the moment they are very small. It might look better if those ripples were ~3 times their current size.

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