Shaders

Work in Progress

This page is currently WORK IN PROGRESS. Some things may be missing.

Feel free to contribute and don't worry about perfection - other editors can make corrections if necessary. Just get creating!

Shaders are math-heavy code that make visuals look really nice.

The shading language seems to be HLSL in the game.

Observations

Two tiling noise maps used in shaders

These 2 noise maps are used for the ion beam right now.

Those maps create the underlying Texture which is then multiplied with the Color as described in Beam colors.

Also notice how the noise maps are seemingly tileable, that's how the beam doesn't have tiling issues.

The shader also calculates the distance from the beans center and drops off intensity, and "adds in transparency".

Well it doesn't add transparency really, because everything is transparent if it doesn't have a color in the shader based on the blending mode.

But that mode is defined somewhere in halfling.dll or cosmoteer.dll (probably).

There are also helper functions in the shader that calculate the end position of the beam for easily creating effects that have to take the ends of the beam into account.

Looking at the shader, it seems like the beam tapers down at the beginning and end of it.

Examples

Work in Progress

This subsection is currently work-in-progress: Some things may be missing.

Feel free to contribute to make it better!

Original text courtesy of : void* (Skynet), on Discord