Help with special effects

massali

Hey there,

I'm playing around with the Pachinko tutorial and I'm focusing on what type of special effects GS is capable of handling. In my version of Pachinko, the scene features the following effects:

- The ball is a sparkling comet which leaves a trail of fire and smoke (PNG sequence)
- The comet glows up it's surrounding area
- The ball explodes as it hits the goal
- Mysterious flashlight lightning (that should follow the ball)

I'm having issues with the top two effects that I mentioned. I'm not sure on how to implement the comet to make it look realistic but still have the physics and animation of a ball and comet. I'd like for an example the trail to be correctly positioned and rotated in according to the direction the ball is moving. I'm thinking of splitting up the comet into two parts, the spherical shape and it's trail. Is that the best solution? If so, how would I make sure to have it act realistically?

Regarding the glow, I was thinking of spawning a PNG that contains a semi-transparent color which should follow the position of the comet. Is this the most optimal way of doing this? If so, how can I do this? I'm right now messing around with the Constrain attribute rule but I can't constrain it's position to the ball for some reason.

Thanks in advance.

PS.
To give you a better understanding of the issues, here's an (outdated) preview:

DreamLab

Love the art. Really great. May I ask what program you use?
DL

massali

Thanks for the kind words, DreamLab!
I mainly use Adobe Photoshop.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/

DreamLab

I have all of adobes programs haha. Where did you get the texture? Looks very polished and very good. I haven't used photoshop in a while though. Using illustrator right now.
DL

massali

I create all textures myself. I guess they are more like collages since I put together various photographs, textures and patterns to achieve the desired visual style.

Using Illustrator is a good idea, always good to have your work in vector so that you can rescale it without any problems. Can't really do that with the photorealistic visual style that I'm into though. Although I wish I could.

allaboutiweb

massali, can you not use the particles behavior on your comet actor. I know you can add an image to act as the particle so you could add the smoke cloud there. Here's a useful video form WesWog:



As for the glow, FireMapleGames has an amazing 'torch' effect demo that you could use to the same effect:

http://gamesalad.com/game/2732

I hope that helps,

Tim

JohnPapiomitis

For the fire and smoke trail use particles and then put sin and cos in the offset and the trail will always be correctly positioned and rotated

massali

Just about to go to bed, I'll have a look at your comments in detail tomorrow and get back to you guys. Thanks though! Appreciate it.

massali

Thanks for your replies, guys. I'm trying out the Flashlight demo but I'm running into problems. I'd like it to move with the ball/comet instead of the mouse cursor. To achieve, I'm trying to change the rule of contraining it's X and Y attributes from the mouse to the positions of the ball. But the ball isn't showing in the expressions list. Any idea why?

massali

Any thoughts on my latest issue? Any help would be appreciated.

spliket

This tutorial on youtube is about recycling actors, but in the middle somewhere he talks about how he keeps the rocket facing the correct direction. You could use the same method to keep the tail of the comet facing the correct direction...and then add particles for smoke?

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spliket

This tutorial on youtube is about recycling actors, but in the middle somewhere he talks about how he keeps the rocket facing the correct direction. You could use the same method to keep the tail of the comet facing the correct direction...and then add particles for smoke?

spliket

massali said:
Thanks for your replies, guys. I'm trying out the Flashlight demo but I'm running into problems. I'd like it to move with the ball/comet instead of the mouse cursor. To achieve, I'm trying to change the rule of contraining it's X and Y attributes from the mouse to the positions of the ball. But the ball isn't showing in the expressions list. Any idea why?

One actor cannot access the attributes of another actor. So, you have to create Game Attributes for interaction between actors. So, you'll need to create 2 game attributes: BallX, BallY or whatever.
Then:
In ball/comet:
constrain game.BallX to self.positionX
constrain game.BallY to self.positionY

Then:
In the other actor you want to follow the comet:
constrain self.positionX to game.BallX
constrain self.positionY to game.BallY

Is that what you were looking for?

AjBlue

real artists hand draw their work