Since around early October, I’ve been experimenting with some special effects control concepts in Unity3D: effects sequencing and layering, magic missiles, that kind of thing. I’ve blog’d fairly extensively about this at http://effectronica.com but unfortunately my blog has a rather small readership and I get little feedback. So here I am posting in the heart of the Unity community in the hopes that maybe a few of you might find this work interesting.
Below is a summary of Unity Web Player demos I have posted. They are not intended as a showcase of fancy special effects and magic spells. The effects themselves are kept very simple to help convey the underlying principles used to organize, sequence, and constrain the base effects.
[ First Unity Web Player Test ]
This was my first Unity3D demo, showcasing the sequencing of multiple base-effects into conceptual groupings. The resulting multi-effects are presented in a setting that roughly imitates targeted spellcasting in World of Warcraft. The ProtoPack, available in the Asset Store from Frogames, was very helpful in this demo.
[ Mage Missile Demo — Unity Web Player ]
Here, the previous demo has been extended to use a “magic missile” projectile system to deliver effects to a target. There are 7 different missile behaviors to try here, including Legend of the Seeker, Death from Above, and Super Collider. The ProtoPack is again used in this demo.
[ Mage Missile with Detonator Payloads ]
In this last demo, the magic missile system has been isolated from effects sequencing elements and combined with the 3rd-party explosion framework, Detonator. This was mainly done to explore how well the mage missiles combined with another pre-existing Unity3D add-on. Obviously, the Assets Store’s Detonator Explosion Framework is used here, but try to look past the exciting explosions and observe how they are used as missile payloads here.
Constructive feedback on these demos is greatly encouraged and much appreciated.
Was about time that you mention it here too not only on the closed GG AFX boards and twitter / blog
Looks very interesting and I like some of the effects and naturally the sequencing etc. and if its just half as easy usable as AFX it will be a blast
Critique:
Detonator Payloads would be great if it allowed me to click the target point. Its always hard to kind of “rate” something if you don’t know how well it works flexibly
The rainbow missile and the first one in the 2nd webplayer look the same to me?
A subtle difference between those examples in demo 2. Missile [1] is pretty much a “control” case, a bare missile with no “pilot” components. It just flies in a straight line at a constant velocity. Missile [2] adds pilot components for drag and gravity which causes the missile to fly in more of a ballistic arc. Both behaviors are quite easy to reproduce in stock Unity, but you can for instance combine the drag and gravity pilots with a seeker pilot to make a guided ballistic missile.
In the missile/detonator demo, I intentionally left out a selection system, and just used a single target object for each scenario, but the missile system is pretty flexible. In the demo, the missile is coupled to a target at launch-time. When [Launch Missile] is pressed, the code queries the setup for a target Transform, instantiates the missile, attaches the target Transform to the missile, and then launches it. It would not be difficult to modify the demo so that a mouse click generated a position projected into the scene, created a temporary Empty GameObject at the position, and then used it’s Transform as a missile target.
The work here was experimental, but also implemented with an eye towards releasing in the Asset Store. The Mage Missile system is fairly tight and polished, but it would be my preference to case-study it first on an actual project. I’m not sure if that’s totally necessary though.
The effect sequencing needs a bit more work, and it also is a little fuzzy as to what the ideal size of the product’s scope should be. It’s also a little trickier to build demos for it that are also redistributable. But this is what I’ll be working on next, and we’ll see how it comes together.
Hah, I see what you mean. For better or worse, I have this habit of naming effects in ways that attempt to be silly, stupid, or clever, and often reference phrases or titles from pop culture. In this case, missile [2] is named Gravity’s Rainbow, after Pynchon’s book where the title is intended to describe the ballistic arc of the German V-2 rocket. The fact that the effect also ended up using rainbow colored particles was an accident.
I don’t doubted that
My point was more towards seeing how smart the missiles finds its way with less trivial targets or with changing targets for example, “experience its dynamic” if you want to call it.
Its a great thing anyway and I happen to love sitting there and using the hover missile and watching how it “sits to backstab”
OK, I get it now. I always had moving targets in mind with this guidance system, but have not really experimented much with targets that change in a discontinuous fashion, except maybe in cases where you have a target that teleports to a new location while a missile is locked onto it. Might be worth experimenting with that kind of test. For a discontinuous target jump, I would expect this particular seeker pilot would adjust steering toward the new location at a rate determined by its SeekingPrecision. If set to 1.0, it will snap immediately toward the new location.
