Hey I’ve been watching TitanFall and was curious blender could support doing any of the screen distortion effects you see when a Titan takes damage. Like the examples below
what about using render to texture onto a plane from a camera,
distorting the plane = distorting the world?
with a kdtree you would not need to iterate to get what points in the plane to operate on, so it could be pretty fast,
https://www.blender.org/api/blender_python_api_2_70_0/mathutils.kdtree.html
just build the tree ones with a init, and find the screen location using object.getScreenPosition ?
http://www.tutorialsforblender3d.com/GameModule/ClassKX_Camera_4.html
may take some fiddling
oops, I was thinking blast waves (like the screen rippling)
to do that, you could do the same effect I just described, but move the individual faces that make up the screen around, have some trippy static behind it or something(behind the plane*)
or a GLSL shader that offset locations?
I haven’t used a kdtree yet but one of my mini maps uses the video texture method. I was thinking something similar. Just placing a video texture in front of my camera of exactly what I’m already looking at. then animating/distorting the plane I’m now staring at.
yeah, a kdtree can get a list of points to operate on, then get the points distance from the center, to do effects,
store it’s natural position to return it to over time, just pulse your ‘pick points’ and have it gradually go back to normal and it should look really cool… in fact I think I want to try it 
but I am baking out a fire sim :3
Theres a good demo of how to do this in the resources forum. Look for “refraction and reflection” and dig aroung in the blend. Theres a heat shimmer example in there.