   Heat haze algorithm
  hello.  I'm working on a game in 2D, and I happen to have a screen with the sun all shiningI'd like to modify this background by applying a rippling effect to itthey call it a heat haze effect, the effect of looking at something through hot air or gazI tried to move the pixels along a sinusoidal formula - if you can picture the effect...it's rippling allright, makes a cool effect, but not quite exactly like looking through hot airis there someone that can point me to some algorithm or pieces of algo I could use   
  Heat haze is caused by looking through turbulent air, and turbulent fliud flow is notoriously hard to model. You could try modelling the visual effect by creating random rising 'blobs' that deform the pixels you see, maybe.   ;  I found this link after googling for a bit. It's GLSL + FBO, but you'll have to live with it.   ;  yeah I found this one too...looked at the source a bitbut it seems he generates the effect with a particle system defined in some engineI hoped I would find something about 2D pixel-by-pixel manipulationoh well...in the worse case I'll try checking that code in depth   ;  ATI did a screensaver that uses that effect although I'm not sure if they made the code available anywhere. You can find the screensaver @ http://www.ati.com/developer/screensavers.html   ;  You could use perlin noise with (x,y,time) coordinates. I tried this with a fullscreen heat-haze, and to restrict it to an area, you could do it with a small quad and blend the edges to the original image.ch.   