Compositor Effects are awesome!

Godot 4.3 is almost here and the new rendering hooks as compositor effects are just awesome.

It's never been easier to make and stack post-effects together.

The way it works is that at several steps in the rendering process a CompositorEffect can act on the image before it is passed to the next rendering step.

This allows us to make sure incredible new effects that could not be possible before.

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Besides all that, we can even get a motion vector for the image.

The motion vector gives us an colored image representing all things that have moved.

The effect that pixelates (based on Pixezy's) the sphere on movement is using that.

I've been playing around with it, and its really fun to work with.

The one problem it have for beginners is that it uses a Compute Shader, and needs to be written in .glsl. Compute shader also have a lot of boiler plate code and setup that is needed that might confuse some people. But it is incredibly fast to run.

But I promise you, it is simpler than it sounds.

If you already used .gdshader, you will quickly see how similar it is to .glsl.

The compiler errors are not that easy to understand at first and the functions can be a hassle to work with sometimes, having to be very explicit about types, but you get used to it fast.

In order that allow beginners to easily try making post effect, BastiaanOji made a extremely nice example in the godot's project demo.

It writes up all the compute shader creation code and you just have to type the .glsl code inside the inspector.

No extra coding needed. It works great for simple tests and to get familiarized with glsl.

(while it is easy to use, it only has the basic functionality. So no motion vector or timer variables)

Also, if you are going to use timed effects such as the glitch shader on the video.

You can enable the editor settings to force Godot to always update the viewport.

If you don't, the shader will only update inside the editor every few seconds, or when it receive events.

That's it. 

Just wanted to talk about this.

I think we will see some really cool shader effect in the future of godot now.

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All that's left now is wait for the stencil buffer (https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7174)
There was a attempt that got made but never merged (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/80710)

But that's for 4.4 now.