I have raycast “histscan” weapons in my game. I’ve been trying to figure out a clean and efficient way to make good looking bullet tracers, like the these.
People have suggested making each bullet a characterbody3D and deleting it when it touches something, but that would involve the physics server which seems really expensive for nothing. Unity seems to do this via particles, but I haven’t found a way to wrangle the GPU Particle 3D node for this. It seems to only be for chaotic particle effects.
Gotcha. Well it certainly doesn’t need to be a particle. Since you’re already doing a hitscan, that gives you a start point and an end point. You just need a good-looking Node3D of some sort to lerp move between the two. Oh actually not lerp, since you want to move it at a uniform speed, but you get the idea. Probably a MeshInstance3D will service just fine with the right shape and coloring, or even just a quad with a shader. Create it at the gun, move it to the endpoint, the free it. If it becomes a performance issue then create a pool and recycle them.
By making it really long is one way. The vid you linked they actually don’t seem to stay connected to where they were shot from. I think they’re just long and fast enough you don’t notice.
If that were the case, the tail end would appear behind the player shooting it. That doesn’t happen in games. I think what it does is it stays attached, stretches to the final position, then the tail end retracts until it too reaches the final position.
