This is a lot to ask, so I get if you don’t want to do it. But, if you are willing to do it, a better effects system in Gdevelop would be very useful. Kind of like unity’s effects system.
Our current effects tab is a little bit limited, and this would be a nice addition to the game engine, and it would be awesome if it was easy to understand. Maybe add it as an advanced option in the effects tab.
Although this would be very cool, I understand that it isn’t the easiest thing to add to gdevelop.
Thanks a lot!
Hello derplord,
Thank you for your topic.
To better understand why you are requesting a system like Unity’s, I’d like to know which are the features that make you perceive something as “better than GDevelop’s” when working with effects.
Could you please explain:
What are you concreatly trying to achieve with effects?, and
What are the actions or steps that you struggle with in today’s system and are stopping you form executing them?
A way to creating smooth object trails would be nice, ideally one that also allows to use user-made textures for the trail. This would be different from particles in that it creates a single continuous trail object that follows the emitter and bends to match it’s path, with customizable length, fade rate, color, vertex count etc. Unity has this trail render component to do this: Unity - Manual: Trail Renderer component reference
We can already create something approximate with the particle system, but it isn’t quite the same. Feels like having this one trial object instead of hundreds of particles would be way more economic in some of situations. And the particle system struggles when using a fast object for updating the emitter position.
This is extremely cool and really neat for certain physics games I guess. But it isn’t exactly the same usecase as a trail renderer, since the the rope object seems physics based, therefore isn’t following the source path exactly and can collide with itself. Performance also seems to struggle at times, when doing certain movements. This would be bad for an object trail, which personally I’d want to be able to use on like a hundred objects simultaneously without noticeable performance impact (missile trails etc).
Oh sorry, I didn’t see the other scenes. Those implementations are great, pretty much exactly what I’d love to use.
There are some visual artifacts when the rope source stops moving or you make a really short trail, more overlapping trail bits are rendered on top of another and that looks off with the transparency.
And I can’t tell how well optimized this is, but ball trail still works fine with 400 trails, so that’s cool.
In a way I find it real neat that that the fade is added directly due to the sprite used and the other properties or governed by how/when the rope is pulled. This might be more flexible in some ways that having the trail be a stat based effect. At the same time I’m not sure how you’d do a trail of a specific length. Is that possible? What exactly happens when the rope is pulled? How far does this move the rope in? What are point 0 and 1 of the rope?
Overall great work! I hope this gets published, would love to play around with this more. The fact that the trail can be animated really is the cherry on top, I’ll try this out with some anims as soon as I get the time.
But I kinda would just like to be able to have more control over what effects i can add. Dont get me wrong, I very much enjoy the current effects, but to replicate something like this, you would probably need to stack multiple effects, and that would lag a bit.
