Today I added a postbuffer pixel shader to do light amplification for ETADS. Based on Geeks3D lightamp shader and modified for Leadwerks Engine it actually performs amplification by sampling the source pixel and if it's below a threshold, boosts the pixel intensity. Pretty neat.

These are tests, the left half is the amplified area, right side is ambient light.

The the first greyscale image has the polarity reversed. Into the mix I added a scanline mask with animated noise. The ETADS mask looks pretty good although I'm using a 'scope' mask here which more interesting visually.

The last shot shows more of the noise distortion that makes the image 'buzz'. This is almost ready to drop into the TADS class.

As for thermal imaging, we would need to add heatmaps as secondary UVs or fake it using some heat lookup. This is adding a level of complexity I don't want to pursue at this time as we could spend years throwing in tiny amounts of detail most gamers are not going to need.

This amplification shader allows us to give some threshold and boost control to the gunner so they can apply some measure of skill in finding ground units visually in poor lighting conditions.

*edit*

After some consideration I think some attention to thermal signatures would be good after-all. This could be done by adding an "objectname_intensity.dds" map to texture channel 4 or 5. Then modify the base Leadwerks pixel shader to boost the intensity of the pixel from that channel. It shouldn't be too hard to take an existing diffuse texture map, desaturate and reduce the brightness to almost nothing then airbrush in some intensity levels.

This would work well with the light-amplification post processing shader too.

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