The BitBull Blog

Been far too long since I updated the devlog, it’s not that I’ve been slacking but that there simply hasn’t been enough progress made to warrant writing anything. I’ve had my hands full with a big chunk of contract work and haven’t really been able to face yet more coding on my ‘off’ days, preferring to try and get the new Muleskinner Jones album finished instead. No luck with that yet either! Now I’m beginning to understand why so many #indiedev projects never reach completion, as well as feeling like I used to when I’d try and keep a diary and end up trying to write three month’s worth of entries in one go.

Anyway – there has been some progress. Now that the alpha’s done I’m starting to work on new weaponry and the first up is the flamethrower. I deliberately started with what I thought would (probably) be the hardest weapon to get right and it hasn’t disappointed on that score, hence splitting this entry into two parts. Firstly we’re going to deal with getting the flamethrower to look and feel right (which is as far as I’ve got at the moment), next up we’ll deal with collision detection and actually getting the thing to do damage to enemies.

My first attempts at generating a convincing ‘fire’ effect with particles were pretty ropey, at best they looked like one of those cannons that shoots streamers or confetti rather than flame, some kind of manic party popper. Eventually though, after going down far too many blind alleys, I realised I was superficially trying to recreate what a flamethrower looks like rather than how it actually works. A flamethrower, of course, doesn’t actually shoot flame – it shoots a highly flammable liquid which is ignited as it leaves the barrel.

So, instead of using a single particle emitter to despatch a bunch of particles from the barrel of the weapon, I worked on firing a bunch of imaginary blobs of liquid. Each of these act as individual particle emitters so they appear ‘on fire’.

You can see the first results of this approach on the right, alongside an approximation of the motion of the individual ‘flammable blobs’. At this stage things still looked nothing like a flamethrower but I could tell that I was at least on the right track (believe it or not this was a massive improvement upon my earlier efforts)!

The next step was to vary the intensity of the particles dependent on how long their parent ‘blob’ has been in the air. I imagined a very intense, focussed flame to start with that would gradually get weaker and less focussed as the ‘blob’ burnt out and dispersed. After some tweaking to this effect my flamethrower was actually starting to look pretty convincing!

Last tweak was to give the individual particles a small amount of vertical acceleration, as if the heat was making them rise, and I was now pretty happy with the way things looked. Unfortunately my job was far from done!

Up until this point I’d been testing the flamethrower whilst firing from a static position, of course as soon as I tried it whilst moving everything went horribly wrong! I had been applying ‘correct’ physics to the ‘blobs’ in that, when fired, they are given a horizontal force from the gun as well as a horizontal and vertical force based on the players movement. It just didn’t feel right in practice however and I could see I was going to have to apply some ‘fake’ physics in order to get things to play nice.

I couldn’t find anything much on the Internet to help me but I did find an interesting YouTube video on the physics of the flamethrower in Half-Life 2 which demonstrated that the flamethrower ‘blobs’ always move relative to the player rather than relative to the game world. I reworked my code to operate on this basis, it was a definite improvement but I felt things has now gone too far the other way and the flames felt too rigidly ‘stuck’ to the player, it looked particularly noticeable when the player switched direction.

So I applied a kind of ‘halfway house’ approach instead, keeping the blobs moving relative to the player as long as the player maintains the same direction and keeps ‘fire’ held. When the player changes direction or releases fire the blobs are ‘unstuck’ from the player, ie the force of the player’s currently horizontal and vertical motion is applied and they are left to move relative to the world.

This seemed to be a good compromise approach as it allows for strafing and general playability whilst also looking nice and ‘fluid’ as the player changes direction. Now I just need to figure out the collision detection…

Dev Time: 2 days
Total Dev Time: approx 117.5 days

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