New beam cannon

While playing around with the beam cannon, I found some visual glitches with the line drawing code, which ended up not being solvable by simple methods (they were basically a consequence of trying to use a line to draw what’s more accurately a cylinder).

So, after trying to fix this still using the line code, I decided to just add a lot of quads instead, all 45 degrees offset from each other to make a volume of sorts (using a lot of alpha and some tweaks on the texture).

With that in place, I still thought the beam still looked very static, and thought that it would be great to add some “pulsing” to it, so I ended up adding a system to be able to add custom shaders to blits, and making a “beam cannon” shader that alters the texture coordinates with time, which makes for a pulsing effect:

It looks great in movement:

Although GIFs don’t quite cut it…

I’ve also found some raycasting problems which need urgent solving, so I’m now working on those… I’ll probably need to overhaul all the raycasting code, since it’s very messy at the moment because of the optimizations…

Now listening to “The Trooper EP” by “Sentenced”

Link of the Day: This is a super-amazing feat… This guy played the whole of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” backwards (with guitar, bass, drums and even vocals) and then reversed the video… It’s incredible: