Copy that, thanks! Much to consider, etc

Huh. I’ve been curious about trying Godot for awhile and always assumed I’d use C# when I finally do. Have you found GDScript to be any better for this case?

I don't know how to convey to people that POLICING in the US is experienced by countless Black and brown people in the way that ICE is currently acting towards people.

We’re big fans of these! www.177milkstreet.com/recipes/vene...

“I use it to generate ideas” Brother I have more ideas than I can pursue in ten lifetimes. I have new ideas every day. What desolate mind are you living in that you have to ask the Know Nothing Machine for *ideas*

Everyone is always sure it must be good at something they know nothing about

“It’s good at writing” say non-writers. “It can be used for design” say people who don’t design. “It’s good at making summaries” say people who didn’t and won’t read the original text

I mean this literally, like how anyone uses this stuff at all is baffling to me. Every output I’ve ever seen from it is so devoid of meaning and intent that I can’t imagine it helping at any part of any process whatsoever

This turned out to be “Grizzly Bear”. If you want to know how my week is going

As a final flourish, I add a simple particle system to simulate ash. And with that, the effect is done—until it’s not. Iteration continues, and the needs of tomorrow may outweigh the needs of today.

But that is another problem! One at a time.

In the way these things sometimes happen, this works perfectly the first try.

I realize "heat distortion” doesn’t fully describe what we're after. Ideally it would obscure/fuzz the image as well as bend it. A blur seems like it would do the trick, but we want it only sparingly, and probably synced with the distortion. Can we reuse the mask, with the alpha as the blur radius?

Until it works! In the end I add a vertical blur to let the distortion “rise” off the lava. I also tweak the noise for less intensity, and add a cosine wave to the original sine wave, using a different amplitude and frequency. I’m happy with the distortion pattern now, but something’s still missing.

So much of this kind of work is iteration. You have an idea, you test the idea, you modify the idea, you test again. This thing I thought would work is too subtle, what if I multiply it? My code is broken, what error did I get? One problem at a time, over and over, and over again

We’ll try a blur so that the mask softens and expands. This looks much nicer in this view, but will certainly need adjustment for the final effect. I can already guess that it'll need the gamma boosted, or a directional blur of some kind

Let’s switch views to see the mask channel itself. We can see our perlin noise texture, and how it has the harsh edge of the lava tiles.