I’m working on a third person shooter, and want my bullets to have the typical tracer effect so you can see the rough direction of your bullets. Right now I’m spawning a ribbon trail, but I have to set the particle spawn rate extremely high due to the fast speed of the projectile (I’m attaching the particle emitter to the projectile actor which has a velocity of 20,000 units/second).
I’d like to avoid this, as the effect doesn’t look super nice and the particle count slows down everything. What’s a better way of doing this?
Note: this isn’t a hitscan weapon, its a fast moving project weapon
My solution was to use anim trails, though I only get away with that because my game is cartoony and drawing big white swoops is something I can get away with.
One of the common solutions to this is to instantly spawn a ribbon with it’s distance pre-computed based upon the gap between the player’s position and the object they are shooting. Then through a material, you would do the effects (such as the smoke trail, the bullet glow, the smoke lingering and/or dissipating, etc.) This gives a ton of artistic flexibility and eliminates a lot of issues. You can also go a step further and build your material FX in world (to local) coordinates. This would further amplify the possibility for really unique visual fx and awesome looking tracers, however it is not required.
