The water now dynamically refracts objects submerged in it, and is full of floating dust so that light cannot penetrate it very far.

I adapted the distortion system to allow for heat haze from convection in really hot environments, such as this desert:

I added depth of field effects that can be used for cutscenes. The camera can focus on any particular distance plane, and everything is blurred based on distance from this focal plane. This lets us focus on a nearby object and blur distant ones, and vice versa, to add another depth cue and draw attention to different areas.

We can now apply distortion effects to anything; in this screenshot I applied a basic refraction shader to the player model! Screen-space distortion is much faster than cube map distortion, because we do not have to render the scene extra times.

This effect will be used for heat haze, water refraction, fire distortion, and so on.

Today I added initial water surface reflection and refraction effects. I haven’t started on underwater effects yet, but that is next!

I just added fast approximations of motion blur and high-dynamic-range lighting. Motion blur blurs the camera image appropriately in response to really fast movements; this is not the same video echo effect used in Lugaru 1 for slow-motion. High-dynamic-range lighting lets us have pixels that are brighter than pure white, so that they ‘bloom’ onto surrounding pixels.