Laser-type ammo?

#1 Needs shaders to archieve that effect. You could make a simple arrow as projectile, give it a bright texture and apply a glow shader to it and done. Very easy to archieve with TGEA. I'm doing something like that in the FGE (although those are TGE screenies and not TGEA, still porting to TGEA).

#2 Well, darn, I don't even have the money to upgrade to 1.5, let alone buy TGEA. Is it possible to just make a DTS arrow type model, texture it white and then make it emit coloured light? I doubt that would give it the right look though. Any other ideas on how to achieve this effect?

#3 Well, you won't for sure archieve the same results without shaders as showed in your screenshot, but you could even get nice results with stock TGE. So adding a light is one thing (just enable it in the datablock) and you could play also with the blending options like inverse alpha. Could help you archieve that effect a bit.

#4 Have you checked out these resources?

Torque Laser Beams


Continuous Laser

#5 Yeah I took a look at them Tim, but it's not what I'm looking for. Thanks Martin, I'll give the blending options a go.

#6 I dont think something like that would necessarily require shaders. but it would require a custom solution as it's something you couldnt do with stock torque.

#7 Well, since I don't know anything about C++ other than compiling other peoples resources, could somebody help me out with a solution?

#8 Ya, buy TGEA, apply glow and emissive flags to the object's materials.cs file. Solved! :)

#9 You could pull it off in TGE with a couple of intersecting cross section planes, an appropriate texture with alpha channel and self illumination. I know Max supports the self illumination setting, not sure if the other modelling apps do.

In all reality, that's probably exactly what's happening in your screenshot example.

#10 Tribes 2 achieved similar results using an ifl file with associated textures on an animated model.

#11 You also could achieve this by sign a particle effect to a weapon.

#12 You really don't need shaders to pull this one off, in fact that would probably be overkill. what it looks like from that picture is that the bullet is merely a billboarded image as each of them look exactly the same. Fucifer is also correct a similar result could be obtained using particle effects. Torque doesn't have any solution for a trail such as we see here. If I were to program such a thing I would use a dynamic vertex buffer that extended based on where the bullet was in relation to the camera, again billboarded. That might be too hard to do with torque so I would either use a particle effect for the trail or not have one.

#13 @DizzyDoo: I have a cheezy one I made for TGE which you are free to lift (or anyone else for that matter). You can get the whole tamale if you download my test game:

[/url]http://singularityfps.com[/url]

The datablick is "saucerweapon" in, erm, singularity/server/scripts/warsparrow.cs. Yeah I'm too lazy to rename a script.

The DTS for the laser (but not the weapon image) is mine and feel free to use it--I hereby declare it public domain...not that it's anything special. I have an ms3d file I could send you to if it's not in there--I tried to leave the source files for the stuff I did myself in there.