I would like to make a bream effect for one ship to hit another with and am not sure how to go about it. I could make a line of particals, but I am sure there must be a better way of doing a beam. I cant use 2 blended GL beams (2 one with a lighter alpha to create a fade, one on top another slightly wider but dimmer). I cant do this because it doesn’t account for distance/perspective and the lines are one width. If any one has a good surjection i would appreciate it.

Use 4 long intersecting quads like this:

From front:

\|/
-|-
/|


From side:
_______________________________________
| |
---------------------------------------

With blending and a nice texture it looks like a beam, no matter where you look at it.


[edited by - circuit on June 29, 2003 8:02:23 AM]

An axis aligned polygon would probably look better and not have so much overdraw(so it would be faster). Think 2d trees, except they would be axis aligned to the fire vector instead of the y / z axis ( depending on which way is up for you ). It shouldn''t be hard to google the needed information.

An axis aligned polygon woudlnt look so good from the front. Ill be using this in a FPS, so i need it to look decent from the front. Hopefully circuit''s idea will look good.

I dont know how well this would look...
Try using a cylindrical object and placing a cool beam texture on it, then of course blending it.

 |-| |  |  ///////////     || ===========     ||  ===========/////// _________________________________ ===========///////(________)___________)____________) ===========/////// ===========     || ///////////     || |  | |-|

[edited by - yodaman on June 29, 2003 3:58:18 PM]

Thanks for the sugestion, but oddly enough Hawkeye3's looked the best, even from a first persion, shooting the beam.

[edited by - skow on June 29, 2003 7:46:16 PM]

use a blended cylinder maybe with some kind of self illumination (I don''t know how to do this... but sound great! hehe)

Here is a better picture about the 4 quads technique:
http://cs.uku.fi/~ilmola/beam.jpg

[edited by - circuit on June 30, 2003 7:56:59 AM]

Yeah that doesnt look to bad, but you can make a single texture that looks like that and save on draw time.

Still thanks for posting that.

I''m now playing around with 2 flat quads ontop of each other blending one with the texture scrolling in and one scrolling out to make it look "powerfull".

why dont you try some particle effect with billboarded polys,
the particles would simply all move in the opposite direction as the emmiter and give them a long life to simulate the beam.

Hmm, well just an idea -^_^-