Game Development Community

Heat vision?

by Daniel Buckmaster · in Torque Game Engine · 02/01/2009 (1:24 pm) · 4 replies

Has anybody added thermal or heat vision to the engine? I'm wondering how I should go about it. My first thought was to add a 'thermal render' global variable on the client, and use it like the editor render flag. When individual objects render themselves, they can then choose to do things like change their textures to a blue/red texture that is artist-made. Also, they could have special render effects such as particles and transparency(?) only applied in heat-vision (though this wouldn't be handled in object render code, but the render code of the particles themselves).

About the author

Studying mechatronic engineering and computer science at the University of Sydney. Game development is probably my most time-consuming hobby!


#1
02/04/2009 (8:59 pm)
www.garagegames.com/community/resources/view/7945

This might help, has some extra features i found to be pretty cool also.
#2
02/05/2009 (7:54 am)
Thanks, yep, I found that... it doesn't do heat vision, though. I could use it to make the screen red... but that's not what infra-red does :P. I need to actually change the way objects are rendered to give red in hot regions and blue in cold regions, rather than post-processing the rendered image.
#3
02/05/2009 (11:39 am)
What you describe up top sounds like a good approach to me. Then maybe use a gui filter to help the effect stand out.

Would probably be simpler/easier to do in TGEa with shaders.
#4
02/05/2009 (11:48 am)
Yep, that's true... the trouble is, I don't know whether I'll be upgrading to TGEA for this project. There's advantages both ways.
But I do want to implement at least one other alternate render mode for a sort of 'soul-world' view of things, and that would definitely be beyond the scope of shaders. So it might be best to work up a general system based on the editor-render-flag idea and then just enhance it with shaders.