Design Point - Shader Effect

One of the main feedback points that we received from both fellow students and lecturers from our initial presentation was that the lighting that we had used to demonstrate the concept was too harsh and "flashy". This can be seen in the video below:


When looking for a better method to create a way for the player to see the world we looked at different shaders that we could use. These included the effect used in the game Scanner Sombre, a game where the player must scan the world to be able to see, as well as echos from The Division, which show events that happened in the past through a graph of dots.

The Effect used in Scanner Sombre. The player scans the environment which reveals different structures in the environment

Echoes effect used in the Division. These are shown when the player gets within a given range and are accompanied by an audio log to tell a story.
While the effects work well in their respective games, we foresaw that these effects, which rely on using a number of dots, would be difficult to see in VR due to the lower resolution of VR headsets compared to traditional monitors.
We also wanted our effect to have a progressive scan so that the effect would be temporary and the player would have to keep making noise in order to keep seeing, which would lead to more engaging gameplay.

Eventually, we decided to use a post-processing shader that scanned progressively over the environment which had a width based on the amount of sound that an object made. We found that the effect in No Mans Sky best showed the effect that we were trying to achieve, however, our effect would need to be slower so that players could actually see what they are doing.




The final shader that we used was based on the one created by Makin Stuff Look Good. However, this shader only allowed one point to be created in the world, like in No Mans Sky. This was not what we needed for our game and thus required some heavy modification in order to get it working with multiple points of light, which are spread out through the world. The final shader takes in all of the points in the world, their width and distance from their centre points and then applies the post-processing to show when in the world.


This shader works well to show objects to the player for a short amount of time and in a way that is easy to see and engage with.

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