I saw a shader pack in contributions that doesn't use render to texture - any clues as to how this is done?

You can move the vertices randomly in a vertex shader to create a haze like effect. It's not like a post process haze shader though.

oh - that is a cool idea. But it would not distort the background really - I guess you would need render to texture for this?

maybe a very transparent, cube mapped oject, whose verts are moved... but it would have no real volume/filling.

Yes, you need render to texture and then use a pixelshader with some kind of fresnel formula. This can be done with Sphere.

can it? any example?

CAnt really be done easly with Sphere, becasue the code isnt flexible for the user.. you could hack the bloom shader to do a full haze effect, or to somehow localise it..with a alpha texture

Not for the user but for the developer. We're counting on you here.

Yeah, that'd be really nice if you could put something like this in an new version of Sphere.