Beam Special Effect?

[ZayLong]

im working on making a platforming game based of Dragonball Z. and im trying to make a Kamehameha beam effect.

i have it working fairly well. but sometimes ill get "gaps" in the beam. I create it by having "pieces" of the beam being fired multiple times to give the illusion that its one solid piece. Id like to know if theres any more efficient way to get this effect. to get a better understanding of what im talking about if you dont understand. you can try it out for yourself by downloading the .exe simply right click to execute the animation.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=CHCPCX65

[Dynasoft]

That, is coooool.

The only think I can suggest would be to use a custom movement that steps by a fixed number of pixels every frame, avoiding cases where the movement's not the same each frame.

[Pixelthief]

There are more efficient ways but they are quite complex. For example, using a surface object or overlay to draw a line(s) across the playfield, or use a fastloop to generate the objects as you did.

To make less of a 'gap', just position your objects closer to each other in the chain and make their images more 'fluid' on the edges. If you're afraid of running up to the active object limit, make sure to set that to 20000 in the level editor properties

[mobichan]

You could simply make the "beam" a separate object and scale it. Then position the head of the beam at the tip.

[Stephen]

That is really fun to play with. I just lost 30 minutes of my time. :grin:

[xhedgehogx]

Doesn't nivram have a beam example on his site?

[ZayLong]

really Stephen? well im trying to make a bit of an online game based on dragonball. slow progress but its definatlly coming to frutition, thanks.

and xhedgehogx, who is nivram and do you have a link to his site? and to mobichan, how would i have it so that it registeres more then 1 hit to an object

[Monokkel]

and xhedgehogx, who is nivram and do you have a link to his site? and to mobichan, how would i have it so that it registeres more then 1 hit to an object

Here is his site:
http://www.castles-of-britain.com/mmf2examplespage20.htm
You should have a look at the 360 Laser example close to the bottom. There are a lot of other good example files there as well. This method could probably work well for you, provided the parts in your beam are identical along the x-axis.

[mobichan]

You could check that the beam is overlapping every X seconds and apply damage. I would probably make a var in the enemy that is set to a value (for example 10) when an overlap occurs. The overlap code should do a check that the var = 0. Then reduce that var every frame back to 0. Once it reaches 0, the overlap check returns true again and the enemy can take damage again.

[RickyRombo]

I'm losing a minute just waiting for the download

But its ok, because it was definitely worth it!!

I notice that the beam thing is um, causing the jumps to fail (I can slowly climb all the way up the screen by just using it over and over)