I was noticiing that the more modern games make heavy use of "Refractor Planes" (I got that terminology from the commentaries in Hl2: ep1). If my understanding is correct, then each pixel on the monitor can be viewed as the color feedback from an "arrow" shot out of a camera in a straight line. If this is true, then these refractor planes simply bend any of the "arrows" passing through them according to some equation relating to their reletive positions, most likely involving exponential and sin functions. Would this be, theoretically, possible to incorporate in UT04 as a mod, or have I never seen such a thing in UT04 for a good reason aside from performance decrease? Just curious (Can you tell that none of the programming I've learned has anything to do with games?).

Woah! to many big words for my High school vocabulary But Ill read it over and try to understand it.

Actually, I'm not sure that UnrealEngine2.5 can do refractor planes. I've certainly never seen it done. There are other ways of accomplishing distortion and blurring, though.

Oh, didn't know there were other ways. Any chance you could give me a name for this method? I'd like to Google it. My bro was trying to show heat coming out of a pipe and ended up settling for pink-orange smoke puffs with a low opacity around 0.05; it kind worked, but could be better. I think I'd like to look into this effect in mapping for UT. Can you imagine how cool a distorting wave coming from the Skrith guns would look?

BTW, Have you seen the UT3 game play footage? I recall having seen a person grab an orb and hop in a Hellbender. Whenever it got hit, I saw this red flash on the screen and I think I also saw a wrinkling of the image. If it's not these refractor planes, it must be something really cool.

it would look cool, but i dunno if UE2.5 has the capacity to handle more than it does