XDefiant UI - Season 1 to 3

More UI features I've worked on since the release of XDefiant, a free-to-play FPS developed by Ubisoft.
-
Daily Rewards: I had ownership over the in-game implementation of this feature. From translating the design mock-ups to in-game elements, animating the screen on open and the celebration flares for new unlocks, functionality hook-up for mouse, keyboard, and controller, and wrangling the data from the backend to drive it all.
-
Assassin's Eagle Vision Trails: Ideally, the trails used for the Assassin's Eagle Vision ability would have been handled by VFX as Snowdrop has a built-in trail particles system; however, as the post processing was being manipulated to tint the screen it was causing them to lose their color as well. Due to looming deadlines, we were unable to wait for the rendering team to provide capability for the VFX trails to render later. Instead, the trails were handled completely in UI. This required bespoke logic to track all enemy players along with a set amount of positions over a given time; gracefully handle sharp direction changes without warping the line; smoothing the start and end points properly to avoid popping; custom trail texture to create directional flowing effect when used in conjunction with an existing warp shader.
-
Home Takeover Video: A requirement for this video to be affected by Snowdrop's UI blur post process meant we couldn't treat it as a standard UI element as they aren't captured within the blur. Instead, it required manipulating the render pass it resided in and dealing with the exposure adjustments as it would instead be an emissive plane. Handling it this way however meant it could be properly blurred by elements using the UI blur, such as buttons, or by a full screen blur as such as when opening a new screen.
-
Flashbang After Image: Set up the logic to trigger the screenshot when a player was hit by a flashbang, including the associated post processing effects that accompany it. An important part of this work was ensuring the screenshot would only remain in memory as long as it needed to and ensuring it would be cleared regardless of what game state the player was currently in.
-
Screen Shatter Effect: An upcoming MVP animation called for the character to hit the screen with the back of their gun causing it to shatter. It was an interesting challenge I was happen to take on and after a few rounds of iteration based on feedback I feel the effect came out really phenomenal. Ultimately, it ended up being fairly straight forward. The color framebuffer being sampled with offsets based on a warp texture input with a second diffuse texture input for the visible cracks drawn on top of the warped frame. (The animation wasn't ready during my work on the effect I was using the grenade juggle MVP animation instead as seen in the video.)
-
Hot Shot Screen Effect Performance Optimization: Jocelyn Barrios created a beautiful effect shown when a player is the hotshot in the Hotshot game mode but it was costing a bit too much. Using RenderDoc, I was able to identify problem areas with it and test different solutions. By merging textures to limit look-ups and adjusting the draw logic so everything would take place in a single draw call I was able to half the cost without any loss in visual fidelity.