Noise Hunters Devlog 11 - Shaders

4 years ago by Noise Hunters (@Noise_hunters)

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Hello [Code_Name: MEVYE] [Location: CLASSIFIED], welcome back!

Today we will see what type of shader is used in Noise Hunters to generate sound waves!

As we have mentioned before, shaders are a great asset to create amazing effects! however, behind there's a steep learning curve (if you are doing them by code, not with the new shader graph of Unity) and this proved a big obstacle to the team.

We decided to look for shaders made from assets stores and modify them at the best of our abilities. First we found a free shader that generated simple sound waves when something collided. It served as a proof of concept but further in the line of development, we identified problems with the shader, that broke the game. In the end we decide to discard the shader and start to search for anew one.

After some search in the realm of shaders, we found a tutorial to create a "scanner" type of shader, similar to the used in the No Man's Sky . This created a nice effect, if modified, could serve as sound waves.

We made several modifications so the shader would make the effect of sound:

Limit the range: when it reached the max range it would stop advancing.
Fade out: when the limit is reached, the alpha of the shader will start to decrease until the colour would disappear.
Colour intensity: the amount of colour that is seen in the area where the shader is making effect is increased, creating an effect of sphere on the ground. This way it would to see the bounds the sound would create.
Textures: we included the option to use a texture in the colour. As this is a shader that affects the camera only and the objects in-game, the textures are flat in the screen and is only visualised where the shader is. If the texture is too clear, the wave would lose depth.

However, we encountered our fare share of problems when working with the shader. Mainly, the loss of depth, when a player is positioned close to a wall, that has no relief, the shader will make the wall seem as a floor. Many times in play-testing we saw the players bump against walls, thinking there was nothing in front of them.