soft edge areas - ideas on how to approach this?

[OpherV]

In my game I have several environments, essentially polygonal areas that player characters can move into and be affected by. For example ice, fire, poison etc'

The graphic element of these areas is the color filled polygon area itself, and particles of the suitable type (in this example ice shards).

This is how I'm currently implementing this - with a polygon mask covering a tilesprite with the particle pattern:

 

 

 

The hard edge looks bad. I'd like to improve by doing two things:

1. Making the polygon fill area to have a soft edge, and blend into the background.

2. Have some of the shards go out of the polygon area, so that they are not cut in the middle and the area doesn't have a straight line

 

for example (mockup):

 

 

I think 1 can be achieved with the blur filter, but I'm not sure how to go about with 2.

 

How would you go about implementing this?

[wayfinder]

Did you find out how to tackle this? I would be very interested.

[OpherV]

I received a few interesting ideas here:

 

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/75844/how-to-implement-soft-edge-areas-with-particles

 

In the end I went with the approach of creating small sprites with soft edges, randomly place them in the polygonal area and and using add blend mode to achieve visual coherency.

 

You can see the end result here:

http://www.github.com/opherv/evolb

[wayfinder]

That sounds very interesting. I'll see if it works for me! Thanks