Lightning!
But lightning effects - now that's more interesting. For fire effect I have a GPU particle system that I can use, but that's no good for lightnings. What I did is made use of instancing and some noise generated in the shader. The lightning is generated as solid geometry, nothing more then a thin, long cylinder with multiple cross segments, the vertex are displaced using a simple-ish nose, stretched to the right length and rendered as many times I need and each instance can be rotated to make a fan.
Just by passing in different values to the shader I can now make any kind of lightning effect I need.
The glow-bloom pass adds .. well glow to the lightning effect, and a extra point light moving along the lightning ray gives a nice visual effect.
GUI
Programming GUI is always a pain for me. I'm not all that good when it comes to 2D graphics and I also always try to fit the UI on some small display whilst trying to make it readable on a big display, and at the same time make the widgets automatically resize to the window size and to draw it all with as few draw calls as I can... it's hell.The layout, size and callback are all loaded from a JSON file and I'm using a small texture atlas to draw all the elements, so it's easy for modders to re-skin the whole thing. The texture atlas I use look like in the picture below and the final GUI look as show on the video:
