I am developing a smoke grenade using a particle system. My player has a field of view, and anything outside of the FOV is hidden other than the smoke, background, and walls/environment. I want the field of view to be blocked by the smoke the same way it is by walls.
In the particle system, I have enabled collisions type world, mode 2D, send collision messages, and set collides with my walls layer and the mask layer. I also set the radius scale to a good size and made sure it bounces off walls so that I don’t have my smoke going through walls. That works fine. But for some reason, when I add the smoke layer to the field of view raycast’s layer mask, it isn’t hitting the smoke. I also double-checked in the project settings → Physics 2D that the Smoke and Mask collision box is checked off.
I’m not sure what else to try at this point. Do raycasts just not work on particle system’s collider?
At this point I’m just assuming that you can’t raycast particles. I figured out the next best thing that I can do to get a similar effect is to add a new GameObject with the same position as the smoke grenade that has a PolygonCollider2D on it. I’m reusing a piece of code I already had that creates a mesh circle that uses raycasts for the edges of the circle to cut the circle off when it collides with a wall. But for the smoke, instead of creating a mesh, it assigns the PolygonCollider2D all of the vertices of the mesh except for the center vertex. And to make the FOV obstruction roughly match the particle systems shape I am gradually increasing the radius of the circle from 0 when the particle system starts and vice versa when it stops emitting.
It’s still a messy solution though. In my game, you can hold the smoke grenade until it starts emitting smoke so you can run around with it leaving smoke behind. but the FOV obstruction will always be where the smoke grenade is, so the smoke that is left behind does not block FOV. You can also walk into the grenade when it’s on the ground to kick it, although it’s hard to find since it’s obscured by smoke, and this same problem will happen.
If anyone has any ideas that would be a better solution please comment.