Trail Effects from Tribes 2

#1 I wonder if the streaks could be used on projectiles?

Could they also be used to fake motion blur?

Can you have a one dimentional texture for the streak or is it simply a color?

#2 Well for streaks behind projectiles, yes in our project we did add them but to understand it youd probably have to ask my cousin since hes the one who made that specific change to the projectile.

Edit: as for stuff like Inventory, Vehicle pads etc. we never got to adding that yet but if we do put stuff like that for certain models, we will keep you posted.

#3 Neat, I remember having trouble getting it to work with Tribes 2 as well. I went about applying a "streak" texture to a few polygons, worked ok but didn't have the nice glow or "streak" to it.

#4 are there any GG staff that can comment on this?

#5 All the inventory pad animations were done in Max as part of the shapes. So no, you don't get them by default (since it's T2 art), but you can easily make your own.

#6 Guys. All you need to do is apply two "streak" nodes, one where you want the emission to start, and one where you want it to end.

Then you need to draw polygons over time that fade out, the leading edge of which is the start->end edge, the trailing edge is the last start->end edge.

Basically its a queue of poly's.

It'd be quite simple to do really. I guess I'll have a play.

Phil.

#7 uh-oh, you guys done did it now :)

#8 Anything new on this topic?

#9 Phil, did you get anywhere with this?

#10 I actually ended up doing this...

For the station, I simply stored an array of positions for the effect node and built a triangle strip out of it textured with a transparent gradient with additive alpha blending. Worked fine and looked exactly like the T2 one (I used the same exact textures).

You'd do the same for the vehicle station one but you'd have to build segments for the hemisphere as well.

If anyone's intrested in it I can get it up on my site. Currently only does the inventory station effect. You can use it on any object but it's not billboarded (nor was it in T2). I was exploring recreating a mod I made for Tribes2 in Torque so I wasn't looking for anything too fancy. Needs a few extra lines of code to update based on time.

I do have a projectile class which leaves a camera aligned streak behind it if that's what you were looking for. This one's pretty complete, we were using it in Sons Of Valor for streaks behind arrows.

#11 Guys, the streaks were part of the models. Get your modelers to do it 'cause that's where it'll look the best. That's how T2 did it as well. If you load up the models in torque, you'll see.

#12 The streak was a model only for the Disclauncher's disc it was an engine side effect for the inventory stations (and I'm pretty sure it was for the vehicle station too). I did load the models and I recreated the effect based on what was visible from the T2 script and nodes placed on the model (plus the fact that the effect wasn't even there in MAX, just the nodes), trust me this is as close to how the original one worked. The only reason I was doing it at the time was because I was using T2's models.

And for projectiles, it's alright to model it if you know you're projectile will be travelling straight (not affected by gravity like T2's disclauncher) but otherwise you're better off doing it engine side to make the trail look right.

#13 Or buy BraveTree's WarSparrow Flyers for a nice example of contrails on the wing... :)
garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=9