Hi,
yesterday I’ve had a look at Rought’s “Well of Youth”.
The waterfall (made by ratty redemption) is very impressive.
From some distance the bottom of the waterfall has reminded me of “heat shimmer” (sorry don’t know the english term).
Like if you see water in the desert.
Is such an effect also possible?
Problem would be that the distance between the effect and the player has to be always constant.
I Know what you mean, but I have no idea how to create it in quake editor/engine.
I remember playing Metriod (Nintendo Gamecube). There was an incredible beautiful heat-wave around the machine gun, after you have shot a couple of rounds with it.
// L.
thanks nUllSkillZ, and I too would like to be able to create a heat shimmer in q3 engine games, although I guess it would be more complicated then by using autosprites, but I might be wrong… so if anyone finds a way, lets post it in here 
Hey! I’ve had a think about this before and it seems logical to me to have the effect drawn by the engine simply as fog. It would be a certain distance away, closer the hotter it is, further away the less warm. Although I don’t suppose it would rise much above the surface of the underlying brushes. Unfortunately, you do get more shimer on dark, tarmaced surface, like for roads for example. But at the same time, examining each individual brush doesn’t happen with fog either… Pretty sure it could be done with a mod (but then again, I don’t mod…)
All of the really nice heat shimmer effects in games involve using the frame buffer+z buffer rendered back into the scene to get the distortion.
Metroid primes shockwaves, Halos Predator invisibility. Doom 3s glass, Doom 3s heat shimmer.
There is currently no way to do that in q3.
you might be able to do a mild fake using low alpha particles emmitting at a distance from the player on sharp angles… but thats a mod job, not a mapper.
@TwentySeven, thanks for explaining that to us and I guessed it was some thing to do with the frame buffer and distorting it`s contents… is that how the underwater wave distortion was done in some q2 engine games?
Real heat shimmering effects are available for the D3 engine if you have the proper hardware/drivers to support it. I think you require a fairly recent GPU as well as Direct X 9.0b or something like that.
It’s not coded into the Q3 engine or any of it’s subsets.
no ratty, the underwater distortion in the early quake engines was handled two ways, one they stuck a very mild sin wave on the camera FOV, so the image stretched and wobbled on the vertical and horizontal axises a little.
and two, they stuck the equivilant of a vertexmod on all of the underwater geometry, causing it to sin wave around.
understood, and although I`ve seen both those effects, it was the first one you mentioned that made me previously wonder if it was a frame buffer distortion… do they still use that fov distortion in newer engines?
and I didn`t like the vertexmod type method as that seemed to cause splits in the geometry iirc, I guess it was also more cpu intensive, yes?
well its not that cpu intensive, at best its only a couple hundred vertexes being peturbed.
as for the fov thing, last game I saw it in was zelda on gc. Its still a valid technique and it doesnt rely on any sort of buffer feedback (which is something newer cards can do only)