I know of (and have used) some methods in the past to draw a physical border around the edge of the screen…but I have what I have to confess would have been a slightly embarrassing question to ask over a year ago, but then I had a stroke and lost lots of my memories. Relearning everything is a difficult thing and I need some help.
Imagine I’m an actor at the dead centre of the screen with a laser gun that fires a steady non-stop beam outwards towards one direction (not THAT One Direction, that would be too much to hope for! But I digress…) so the beam is hitting one side of the screen and now I spin in place so the laser beam hits all four sides of the screen. Around me at the edge of the screen I want to be hitting a wall which has a slight thickness to it, say 40px and I want to see the laser coruscate off of that wall. This wall needs to be suitable as the edge of the playable area (I’ve locked the camera in place) for all screen resolutions.
Straight out question: How to I create that wall in the best, performance-cheapest way that would suit as many platforms as possible?
As levels change I want to be able to change that border wall’s inside edge to extrude slightly in different ways, ideally. Oh, and I would like to be able to change textures on them, but I’ve been doing this long enough to be able to do the extrusion and colourisation myself. It’s just the best way to build that wall that I need. I can’t use UMG because I can’t get the laser to hit objects in UMG.
*edited for clarity (I hope)