Electrifying!

Today I finished the grenades, including the shock grenade… For that, I had to create a new electricity effect! Was a bit hard fine-tuning it (one of the reasons I’m a terrible artist is that I’m very lazy!), but it was well worth it:

It looks really cool in movement (need to start making videos and GIFs with the effects).

This effect is rather simple… A line is drawn between two positions, but that line is “broken” in several segments, to which I apply some noise. Since the noise component changes every frame, it seems to shiver. The hardest part was making a “line-drawing” system. So far, I’ve been using simple line primitives to make most of the effects (weapons, etc), but I was never happy with it, so I just added a “volumetric line”, which has a width and can have a texture applied to it, which leads to this effect you see. Basically I build a quad from the line, using the cross-product between the “camera to segment” vector and the line direction to make something perpendicular to the line direction and the camera, which makes the width more or less constant.

The final part of the effect is the fact that the lines appear very fast (less than 50 ms) but take longer to fade out (300 ms), which simulates the persistence of vision we experience when looking at electrical surges like lightning.

Since I had this effect up and running, I decided to expand it to other uses, like the electrocannon.

It used to look like this:

Which is quite ugly, but with the new volumetric lines, it looks like this:

Way better, I think… I think it still needs some tweaking, but I’ll leave it for now…

Also took the time to integrate the new bat sprites I got from the artist:

Think I’ll have to increase the size of the bats to really make it pop…

Now listening to “The Damnation Game” by “Symphony X”

Link of the Day: This game looks rather cool, and it’s done by a portuguese development team, so spread the word! The trailer is really good, and the game seems very much my cup of tea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1orqZeUbC_4