As well as all the ongoing work on the physics engine (the convex polygon routines now work except in a couple of extreme cases that I'm fixing), I've taken a little time out to make things more pretty. In this case, I've added some animated 'cilia' that will be used to add dynamic motion to some of the infested areas. The initial version of this is shown in the video below, although I've already updated the actual graphics to add a small bright tip to each strand, stopping it from just looking like grass.
Although there may be thousands of cilia on-screen at any one time, all the work is done by the GPU using immutable buffers. A specialised vertex shader adds the sinusoidal animation based on a time value supplied via a shader variable, as well as adding a small size variation. Also, rather than manually defining the position/angle of each cilia in a level (which would be quite memory-hungry), areas of cilia are just defined by a straight line with a normal.
To further improve the effect, cilia further away from the camera have their colour dimmed in order to provide a depth cue.
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