Tesla Effect
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I have been having trouble making a convincing lightning/tesla coil effect that actually looks good. The effect starts at a fixed point but needs to connect to a moving target, the targets distance changes all the time and this presents the problem. The only way I can do it at the moment is to stretch the effect which looks awful. I was wondering if you might have any insight into how I can use timeline fx to produce a decent effect that doesn’t look stretched.
Also I’m having another problem with the 5000 particle limit, is it possible to increase the amount to say 30,000?
I’ve had a quick go at a Tesla effect and attached it with Blitzmax example. My method was to make a line effect, and set the handle to 0,0 so it originates at the mouse pointer (on the effects tab). I used an electric shape with 2 separate emitters and made their angle point in opposite directions, and made sure that they were relative to the effect. They have a short lifetime as you’d expect with electric, plus the fade in and out on the alpha graph, and grow a little in size. I also added a glow emitter for extra effect.
As for implementing in Blitzmax, see example attached. It’s a case of adjusting the line length and angle to point the effect in the right direction. You might want to tweak it so that the effect maybe spawns less or smaller particles as the line length gets shorter otherwise it might look a bit too condensed.
Currently the maximum amount of particles in the editor is 10000. In the module you can set to whatever you want when creating the particle manager, but 30000 sounds like a bit much! There’s only so much you throw at the graphics card every frame 🙂
I don’t think there’s any easy way to do that at the moment. Unfortunately I can’t look into it much at the moment as I’m right in the middle of moving house, and on top of that the PSU on my main dev PC has died! 🙄
Sorry to hear about your PSU! But good luck on your new house. 😉
Perhaps I could use several instances of the effect in a line between points that I create.
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