No, seriously. Especially if you're one of the poor unfortunates using a CRT monitor. Trust me, it'll be worse if I ever use this effect in a game:
It's adjustable. Anywhere from 'Sparkly' to 'ARRGH MY EYES'. The latter being on an LCD monitor with a carefully calibrated Contrast/Brightness ratio. >_>Here's the original scene (Cube in center is sphere mapped. Sphere uses some cheap and false plasma-ey effects I created by mapping an inverted vignette texture with S coordinates being generated, but with static T coordinates).
This is the same renderer that I'm using for Exile, and I'm messing around with it a bit. This effect is an interesting one I picked up a long time ago, but never tried out (As in, I read about it, but never used it).Essentially, it's a radial blur, but a fake one.Radial blue is a blur originating from the center of the image towards the edges in a circular pattern. Manipulating the color-buffer directly on modern graphics hardware is either a case of using Shaders, or using an alternative. I went for the alternative.The process is simple. I simply resized my viewport to a decent texture-size (128x128), rendered the parts of the scene that I wanted to shine like that, switched back to the normal viewport, rendered the scene normally, then overlayed a bunch of additively blended quads over the camera plane gradually diminishing in size. Result? Blind level 3. Right. So let me make my game so unbearably shiny that nobody will be able to spot it's flaws. :3Turns out that, with a little inverse of color, this can be used to make an apparently seeping darkness around objects. With some stencil-buffer trickery, even more can be done.Anyway… My game:
To sum those pictures up, I did absolutely nothing, or as near to it as I could. I'm going through another creative slump. I can't find myself able to work on art effectively, nor music; but suddenly my math skills are leaping to the forefront again, along with all technical and logical skills. Hyper? Attention span? Just plain nuts? I dunno. It'll pass, as usual, then I'll go through my usual spiel of creating <n> chiptunes, uploading <n> pictures to my DeviantArt account, spriting <n> enemies for my game, and doing who knows what with my time.
I've got an attention span problem. Every time I encounter a new thing, I just have to test it out; new effects, new algorithms, new art style, new music style… Hurts productivity sometimes.Remember my Frosty-4-Digits game? I 'finished' two weeks in, out of four weeks. Attention span. Still did well enough, it seems, but I could have done better.According to those close to me, I'm getting way better at holding down ideas and projects for longer now, and pursuing my research with more fervour than normal.Research into what? Ah, now that's an interesting subject. Maybe I'll blog about it next time.
Game is lookin' sexy! :D