I just can’t make my flame thrower work

News & General Discussion
1

I’m having a huge struggle dealing with parallax issues with my flame thrower. (Making it come out of the barrel but hit in a straight line from the camera).

projectiles and beams are easy.

Projectiles I just do a flash and shoot a bullet out the camera.

Beams I make a fake beam look at where my raycast from the camera hits.

Flame thrower though is just painful to look at no matter how I handle it.

With my plasma a I took a page from quake 3 and have it do an initial jump so you don’t see that it’s not coming out of the barrel.

But with the flame thrower I am at a loss.

Coming out of the barrel and shooting towards the center messes up aiming.

Facing the flame thrower at a raycast hit kinda works but gets screwy when approaching walls and enemies.

Doing a particle effect that moves towards an invisible collider makes it bend in the air and also it’s very noticeable when things are catching fire that aren’t near the particle emitter.

How do games like team fortress 2 do it so well???

2

The nozzle of the TF2 flame thrower is already really close to the center of the screen. Make your life easy and do that. :wink:

If you show us a screenie or a video of what you’ve got maybe we could give specific advice? Right now I’ve no idea what’s actually bad about yours to suggest any particular fixes.

But also… it’s a flame thrower. They are not used for precision shooting. Does it even need a reticule? Just have it come from the nozzle and point forwards. I’m sure players will figure it out from there pretty quickly.

3 Likes
3

Atm, I’m away from my computer. I will post some screens. Thanks for the advice!

4

Get the hit point with a raycast.
Than, set the forward vector of some particle system to the hit point - tip position (with the result normalized).
Play the particle system.