Made some irresponsibly subtle tweaks to the smoke shader for #screenshotsaturday
Still amazed how well this works

Seriously it's stupidly subtle. New version on top, old below:

It used to fade out linearly so I'd get these wide areas of one thin color like a gross film over everything (ie the yellow near the bottom)

Solution was treat alpha as sort of an analogue for density. Texels that get displaced further lose their alpha much faster

as if there were a finite amount of material being thinned out by advection

Except everything's faked with absurd magic numbers I made up

Maybe if I made new features instead of endlessly polishing existing ones I could finish making the game

(but seriously that weird oily film look has been bugging me for YEARS now and I'm super happy to have killed it finally)

(also opened up a LOT more variability to play with. Wanted to stay close to the original look but can go a lot further with it if desired)