fx_glow

One additive shader for every small emissive thing in the energy-shield effect. The material's form picks the look, and the per-instance lane 0 carries life, brightness and seed. It shades the 3D meshes the ShieldFx module builds: the brightness falls off with the angle between the surface normal and the view direction, so each mesh reads as a glowing volume with soft edges. The output colour is multiplied by the lane's brightness and the material's gain.

• Form 0, tracer streak: along a tapered prism (uv.x 0 at the pointed tail, 1 at the blunt head) the colour runs from color1 in the long fiery tail to a white-hot color2 head.
• Form 1, soft flare blob: a hot color2 core inside a color1 halo, fading with the square of the remaining life.
• Form 2, spark: bright along the head of the prism, moving from color2 while hot to color1 as it cools, and fading with life.
• Form 3, burning fragment: a faceted ember that cools from color2 to dark red with a flicker whose rate comes from the seed, plus a faint color1 glow.

The ShieldFx module draws the effect with four materials made from it, all additive with culling off and depth writes off: fx_streak_mat (form 0, gain 1.0) on the incoming tracers, fx_flare_mat (form 1, gain 1.0) on the impact flares and the flashes where each tracer starts, fx_spark_mat (form 2, gain 1.8) on the sparks, and fx_frag_mat (form 3, gain 1.8) on the burning fragments. Each pool is one GPU-instanced draw whose lane 0 the module writes every frame: the tracer prism, a sphere for flares, the prism again for sparks, and an octahedron shard for fragments. The ShieldFxDriver component runs the module in the fx_shield scene.

Properties

Lanes

ShieldFx writes (0, 1, 0, 0) for tracers, (age / life, 1, 0, 0) for flares and sparks, and (age / life, 1, seed, 0) for fragments.