Textured ribbon trails
Filed under: Game Maker
Ribbon trails are very pretty if used right. In fact even if used wrong they’re still pretty most of the time. I don’t know why no one has done this before. I saw scripts that drew them with circles which gets slow or ugly if you go fast, and with lines, which is limited to 1px in width. The obvious thing to do of course is to use a primitive.
So we make a list containing coords of where we’ve been for the past N steps, and then draw it. I’m not going to explain the intricacies of the drawing script but everything is very straightforward and you shouldn’t have problems figuring out how to use it.
When doing mouse decorations or trails, never have them snap to the mouse position! The mouse is a precise input device which is good most of the time but in the land of eyecandy it means jerky, ugly movements. Instead have the decoration follow slowly as I do here. It makes a world of difference.
Related posts
Tags: effects, eyecandy, tutorials
December 17th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Great stuff!
after discovering this, I got so enthusiastic, I made every object in my whole game have a trail. They work great!
I have one question though: Is it possible to have the object stop ‘trailing’ so the rest of the trail can fade away, without just making the trail vanish (as this looks strange)
December 20th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
[quote]I have one question though: Is it possible to have the object stop ‘trailing’ so the rest of the trail can fade away, without just making the trail vanish (as this looks strange)[/quote]
What do you mean exactly?
October 31st, 2008 at 4:54 am
i got a question, i tried adding this to my project, but it didn’t work at all, kept saying there is no ‘trixy’ everytime, and it got reli annoying,
could some1 help me att all, cuz all i would like to do is have a firball zoom across with a cool ghost trail,