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Spent the day fleshing out the the UAV interface, it now looks a good deal better and is fully functional in terms of measuring all the things it’s designed to measure. I also removed the tracker for now in favour of an automatic FLIR-styled effect which highlights the player (and other sources of significant heat) while darkening the rest of the environment. I think I’ll modify it a bit tomorrow to dim out other sources of heat as well, as the sensor is specifically tracking Avery and not general IR-based phenomena; we’ll see how it looks though. 

Among some more significant changes beyond that, implementing the bloom properly – ie, so it wouldn’t render UI elements illegible – forced me to completely reorder the post-processing stack. Before, it went application surface to palette shift to digital distortion to Gaussian blur + bloom; now it goes application surface to Gaussian blur + bloom to palette shift to digital distortion. It was pretty annoying to keep track of the surface stack order but eventually I got it done. Reordering everything also managed to produce an interesting fringing effect when using certain lighter palettes (or really anything that doesn’t use a flat black as the dark tone) where the edges of all the objects become pronounced and, with the rest of the post-processing effects on, kinda ragged, similar to how lower-quality VHS tapes or TV signals would display on older television sets. I’ve decided to keep it in as the default although it can be toggled off like everything else with the other lens effects.