Take a look at this image:
The screenshot itself is from a PS3 game called Haze. The annotations are mine.
To give you a little background on what you're looking at: the view distortions and stuff that you can see there are the effects of "Nectar", a fictional drug that makes you hyper-active and makes your enemies glow orange. You can read up on this at the game site.
anyway, as you can see, the numbers point to several things on the screen. I have several theories on how they can be replicated with "hacks" in RF.
#1: Muzzle Flashes.
This is VERY easy within RF. I'm guessing that the muzzle flashes in Haze may be volumetric, and thus may not look as good in RF, since RF uses 2D sprites. Another possible way is to use particles. I saw a presentation by one of the designers of the Max Payne games, and he used particle effects for his muzzle flashes.
If you're using sprites, however, you can achieve that glow around the flash with alpha maps.
#2: HUD gun models
The HUD (Heads-up Display) weapon models nowadays are very advanced and high-poly. Since RF isn't as advanced as game engines nowadays, you can't make models like that, otherwise the engine will slow to a crawl. One way to make your weapons look better is Normal maps. I'm not sure exactly how it works within RF, but there's a section on it in the manual. There's an interesting article on modern-day weapons designing here.
#3: NPC Model Effects
I'm not exactly sure how they're doing this in Haze, but I'm guessing it's a shader effect.
Since RF doesn't support shaders (as far as I know), there are other ways to approach this. Scripted skin swapping and a light glow can probably approximate the same sort of effect.
#4: Text overlay
Another relatively easy "effect". I don't know exactly how to do this, but I think you could probably incorporate it into the HUD/Interface system. You can use alpha maps if you want it to be less opaque and blend more with the game world.
#5: Real-time view distortion
In the screenshot, the player is taking "Nectar" which distorts and blurs the edges of the viewspace. I'm not sure if there's a way to create such an effect in RF, since the background/gameworld is being directly distorted. You could try just a regular overlay, like in Doom3, when you are clawed at by a monster, the scratchmark appears for a split-second on your HUD.
#6: HDR/Bloom
Ouch. This is a toughie. To my knowledge, Bloom (a component of HDR) is very nearly impossible with RF. I was thinking about over-harsh lighting, but that would also affect other objects, and not just ones I would want it to. I searched the forums, and no one has even tried HDR, I don't think.
Well, that's it for now.
If I said anything completely fraudulent or false, or if you didn't understand something, please let me know so I can fix it.
