This is a complete shot in the dark since CC is dead, but i see no reason not to ask. I'm playing around with shaders for creating special effects in my game (without using tons of particles, its already CPU heavy) and I've grown very fond of a few in particular, namely Pattern/Offset and Ellipse.
Now, Ellipse in particular has a very neat feature, where it smooths out the edge of the circle it creates. This has allowed me to do some pretty neat stuff, since most shaders are bound to the edge of the sprite anyway.
What i'm wondering is, how easy would it be to edit this shader to apply that smoothing effect to sprite edges WITHOUT turning the sprite into an ellipse? I'd crack it open in notepad and try it myself, but it might as well be Japanese to me. I could probably hack a ton of effects out of those techniques if i could achieve this.