High Voltage Link

I was brought onto this project much later into its development cycle with a very specific request. The needed effect was to be a pulse morph like full-screen effect. Almost like a force push if you're a secret Jedi reading this.

The final delivery of this was a pixel shader written in HLSL for DirectX 9.0. This version being the most recent drawing api that our custom engine supported. The effect ended up looking fantastic and was used in the shipped game. The effect was created without loops or if statements, using only mathematical principles. You can see the effect in the video to the left. I also developed this effect with optimization in mind and utilized variable packing and pre-proccessor statements to create default values that developers could then go in and modify to their needs.

The development of this shader took serious work as the engine did not provide any error messages or other kinds of feedback. For some time the effect just did not work at all when implemented. Overcoming this hurdle to research into DirectX 9.0 and much experimentation. The culprit ended up being an 80 line limit for shaders in older versions of DirectX. What I found was that, even though the shader was less than 80 lines of code, the compiled version of the shader was breaching this limit. I only figured it out by looking at the assembly of the shader myself and simplifying it as much as I could.

The effect ended up working after this extensive bug hunting process and the shader became much more optimized and simplified in the process.