It’s called the ‘Gamma Ray’ and I was deliberately going for a kind of retro 50s sci-fi vibe with it. As with the bulk of the weapons (probably more so), there’s actually very little to coding the mechanics of it – probably around 90% of the development time here was spent on the visuals.
The ‘ray’ effect is all created with a custom shader. At its heart it’s an approximated sine wave (calculated using the smoothstep algorithm) – to get it looking more ‘electric’ I vary the amplitude of the wave at random each cycle.
I had a lot of issues finding a technique for generating random numbers in HLSL that I was happy with. I tried out a couple of algorithmic solutions but none of these seemed to look much good to me. In the end I used a second texture as a ‘noise’ lookup table, I created this texture myself by rendering to a RenderTarget2D in MonoGame so I could be sure the ‘noise’ was perfectly distributed. I’ll probably write a simple tutorial post on this subject and include some PNGs with different type of randomness.
I didn’t like using a consistent wavelength for the shader as it seemed to make things too uniform so I tried varying the wavelength per frame. This looked much better but I ran into an issue where the ‘end’ of the ray looked weird if it didn’t taper out to a point, which it wouldn’t do when there wasn’t an exact number of wave cycles across the length of ray.
I tried fading out the end to get around this – this worked OK but not great and looked weird when the ray ‘collided’ with enemies or buildings. In the end I settled on a solution whereby I taper out both the amplitude and ‘stroke width’ of the wave to zero, this seems to work fine and, even with a fractional amount of cycles, the ray now always tapers out to a nice point!
Lastly I applied a raster effect to the wave (again in HLSL) and overlaid two different rays with wavelengths cycling at different rates. The wavelength of both waves in tweened using a ‘Bounce’ tween algorithm so it seems to cycle regularly but in a fairly non-linear fashion.
The concentric circles at the muzzle of the gun and at the point the ray hits something are created using the geometric shaders I discuss here, though I’ve added a raster effect and a gradual fade out.
Dev Time: 2 days
Total Dev Time: approx 134.5 days
One Of The First Drafts Of The Raygun Shader
The Finished Raygun Effect
The Gamma Ray In Action
Gamma Ray vs Particle Storm
The BitBull Blog 