I’ve tried the demo and i was really impressed. I’ve a few questions about that:
Thanks in advance to all…
I’m not sure if/when Yoggy’s Unite presentation video will be posted (because it was unplanned, improvised presentation), but that would answer those and more questions in detail…
From my limited knowledge:
Render particles with sort-of-bumpmap into a render texture, then draw a quad in front of them with refractive glass shader. The result is particles that distort the view.
I think it’s a single line renderer driven by a script. Raycast in some direction, walk that line, offseting vertices with random noise, walk back; and do this for a lot of directions.
I guess so… not sure.
My presentation should be online with the rest in a bit, and along with it a project folder that has all of those effects in it (plus a few more).
To answer your questions:
1): What aras said, but you can get a project with it right here: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=4685
2): What aras said. It is one line renderer that walks out along a ray with randomized positions, then walks back. It also emits a couple types of particles where the lightning strikes a surface. But the line renderer is only part of the effect. The particles, lights and other things involved are important too.
3): Yes.
Thank you so much to answer my quest! Yoggy, I’ve downloaded the example you said to me in the past days but i see a black square box and not the heat distortion :? (I use Unity 2.0).
Thanks again to Aras and Yoggy for the help! 
Great Demo! I too have the same problem with the example project file in Unity 2.0. Black square for water with no heat effects in the game window.
Cheers,
Paul
Are you guys having problems Pro or Indie? The effects are Render Textures, which require Unity Pro.
Mine is Pro.
Cheers,
Paul
Pro. I’m using unity on my MacBook Pro 2.16/Ati x1600/2gb/120gb HDD