Note: A better method for terrain hugging is posted below this older one.

Pardon the big .gif. The large size is needed to see the whole effect. You may need to let run though once to see it at true speed.



Another proof-of-concept I decided to do. The little swoosh thing (a cheap-o, 2 second sprite I made) hugs the terrain as it moves through the air. For added coolness, I made it drop emitters every 50ms slightly below its current location. These emitters would them gib themselves after (swoosh lifetime + 100)ms. The idea was to make the ground that the swoosh traveled over erupt behind it seconds after it disappeared.

I wasn't able to get the swoosh to move very well with velocities. Instead, its position is just rapidly being reset every 10ms. If I can ever get a velocity method to work, I'll post that. Also, the rotation is coded based on the slope of the terrain (it'll smoothly transition between rotations).

Would look cooler if the guy were swinging a sword

Here's the Lua for it:


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Updated Version

I decided to try and improve the terrain hugging projectile. This one now uses velocity instead of position resetting, making the effect more natural looking and less jumpy. It can also use 'OrientToVel' now too. So I don't need to use trig to figure out the rotation.

In the testing gifs below, I used blue spheres to mark the movement path of the projectile. The blue spheres also show whenever the projectile's velocity is updated. Notice how the path is a lot smoother than the one above as it travels up the cliff.


Because of an 'if statement' that I left in the script, the projectile will destroy itself if its altitude above ground drops below 2. That's what happened in the one of gifs below (left). It prevents the projectile from digging through the ground. However, this rarely happens on drops. If you want to completely prevent this from happening, remove the 3 lines that make up the "if SceneMan:FindAltitude(self.Pos,0,0) < 2 then" section.



Below are two precision tests. In the first one, look at how closely the sphere trail of the swoosh matches up with one that was previously launched from the same position and angle. There's very little variance between the two.



It isn't always exact, however. Watch what happens when two are launched at the same time, and get caught up on the sharp cliff edge. They both get a little off after that, but still stay in a line.



Feel free to use my code for whatever you can think of. Please give credit, though

This is the actual weapon you see in the .gifs above (except for the outdated one) if you want to play around with it.


Here's the new Lua:

wow, thats really cool. i especially like the rotation..

Holy crap. o_o

Advanced shockwave effects, welcome!

You had better use this for the Ypsilon shockwave. Or I will eat your firstborn son

Actually thats the exact thing I was thinking about.
This effect fits perfectly for space-to-surface energy blasts.

Possibly combined with the other shockwave effect that turned out to be so easy,
it could make some badass visuals...

I'll be honest. The first thing I thought of was that sprite being Road Runner with smoke trailing behind it.

Because there are lots of preexisting space borne weapons systems to compare it to.

Try changing the spriteoffset to be the bottom most pixel of the effect and have a look at what happens to the rotation effect.

You know, now that you mention it...I don't remember ever messing with Sprite Offset.

Oh sh*t!

I've updated the terrain hugging script to use velocity now. It should run a lot smoother.

Check the main post for demonstration gifs and the new Lua. Also, I added a download.

nice, thats what i was trying to do with my tweak of this, but i got waylayed with more important things. swoot, less work.