Shaders

(History blog)
The first level I was doing was Soft Museum but the problem was, it was not at all soft. The ground is suppose to behave like rubber or a trampolene in that level, and I was not sure how to implement this. Changing the vertex in the buffer each frame would be much to slow, the only choice was doing something in the shader. After some research on shaders, I made a vertex shader to take a parameter which is the position of the character, and if a vertex is within a certain distance of this position, then offset it by an amount based on how close it is to the position. The closer the vertex to the character, the more the vertex is offset. For bouncing back into shape when the character leaves an area of terrain quickly (jumps or something), I added a faked-physics animation to the offset range. This method turned out to be very nice looking after some tweaking.

Next I needed the final render to be softer, I was not using any kind of texture sampling being the NiGHTS textures were not bled, so it was very pixilated and ugly the closer the camera was to a texture. I did some research on post processing shaders and render targets, and developed a glow/blurr/blend 3-pass shader. The results after some tweaking were again very nice.

During this time I also added scrolling backgrounds, which still to this day need some work being they scroll rather unnaturaly.