FreeGameDev

I was playing "Silent Hill: Home Coming" for a couple of days and was interested in effect (filter) that is applied to final image to make it dark and noisy. I have done a surgical operation for the game to understand how the effect works and finally got it and implemented a sample program using OpenGL that demonstrates it.

The sample program as well as shaders code is under GPL, so they can be freely used in games/engines or wherever you want.

Before the effect:


After the effect:


To be honest, static images above cannot show this pretty random, noisy effect in a good way, so if you want to look at it better you can check binaries below.

Links
Investigation & Explanation
Linux binaries
Windows binaries
Sources

If it doesn't come across well in images, why not upload a video Or, heavens forbid, an animated GIF

Sorry, I forgot that current technologies are far beyond static images Though I think that any video codec will produce much more noise than effect itself I will try to prepare more useful preview..

I recorded a video from the linux binaries: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-cWVRE-yyc

Oh qubodup, we don't deserve you

Looks pretty cool, although I did think the scene was 3d at first (didn't cross my mind how alapshin would get hold of Silent Hill assets though XD)

TheAncientGoat, you are right that effect is applied to 2d static image and that seems to be ok since this is just a post-rendering effect that can be applied to any image. It could be nice to see this in a gloomy game as well, but I was not able to make whole game as a sample program

qubodup, thanks a lot for the video!