So the basic idea is to have a procedural frost and snow system coupled with a heat map for each texture.
The background is that I would like to make a sort of stealth mech game in a deep frozen post-apocalyptic world (all snowy keeps the art requirements low
) where the player has to manage the heat given off the unshielded nuclear reactor in his mech and leaves heat signatures behind (where the mech stood etc.). So the less you fire and move around the more invisible you become (as snow and frost also accumulated on parts of your mech etc.) and the more you do crazy moves the more likely to have a core meltdown or at least a heat shut-down and you are a glowing heat signature visible from far away.
To make this fully interactive one would need a procedural snow and ice shader on more or less all surfaces of the game.
If one does a google search (or looks at the game cyrostasis) one can see that there are plenty of (easy to implement?) snow and ice GLSL shader ideas floating around.
Given my limited understanding of how texture materials and shaders work I would basicly like to have the following fuctions:
- Procedurally accumulating snow based on the slope of the normal-map (e.g. only the top of stuff gets white)
- Procedural "growing" frost based on the creases (e.g. dust map/ambient occlusion) of a texture
- melting of ice and snow based on the above texture features and an additional "heat-map" that specifies the heat a surface gives off (or how easy it reacts to outside heat)
- A way this heat-map can be influenced in real time (e.g. "scaling" of heatmap based on heat generated and other heat-source nearby plus projecting heat onto a surface by touching it or by exhaust of jump-jets etc.)
- bonus points for adding a snow sparkling effect for textures
- additional bonus points for having snow and ice effected by a wind direction paramenter
- totally awesome super bonus points for improving the snow-flakes system in darkplaces to allow for an all level snow-fall effect that leaves out areas under roofs automatically and has decent performance.
Example implementation preferrably in Xonotic... I would be willing to give help with any artistic stuff needed (custom models, textures etc.).
Know I know this is a lot to ask for and I can only beg someone to try and implement it. But it might be a fun project for someone working with GLSL shaders or who wants to learn some advanced techniques and is looking for a good example project.
THX
Edit: something looking similar to this would be great: http://youtu.be/PWpqwVQYosw