Any plans to create greater visual effects around ambient temperature on our ships or characters, like more heat waves off a hot ship?
TL;DRHeat haze existed in the old planet effects but refraction is expensive; a new, potentially cheaper GPU refraction will be needed for fire's heat haze, so it could spread to wider uses once solved there.
What, just a little bit of refraction?
Yeah, you know that shot from Top Gun when the ship goes in front of the camera and you see all the heat wave in the distance.
You know, the funny thing is we actually used to have that. We had a heat haze with the old planet effects, and I'm sure there'll be people who remember, and I think this has been called out by some backers as not being in the new effects. But again, we've got a new GPU... refraction is really expensive, that's what I should say. That's a really expensive overdraw; transparency, sorting, they're real big thorny issues when you're working on VFX, just in game engines in general, to be fair. So that could quickly become very expensive, but we do have a better, potentially cheaper GPU refraction now. And let's be honest, we're going to need to have that hazy heat effect for fire anyway. So I think it's feasible that once we've solved it for that, we can start to look at it propagating in more general circumstances.