How can I make a continuous laser beam that terminates at the point where it hits something?
I can make a nice looking laser bolt from a glowing elongated cylinder (with a few other effects) but I can't emit them fast enough to make it look like a solid single beam where the source is rotating. It also loses the benefit of the looseness, flow, boil etc when they're flung out at high speed.
Is there any way to achieve a solid beam that doesn't continue beyond the point at which it hits something? I'm trying to attach it to or have it emitted from a rotating turret I built.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
On a side note, thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this incredible game and for giving us the opportunity to play the beta!
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So I think the way to do this is to make the laser beam out of a stroke and then set the length on the laser pointer gadget the same length as the stroke (use the grid to make the stroke a nice neat length.
Then wire the current laser pointer length into the end point input on the stroke.
The laser pointer also gives you a hit position which can be wired into the spawn position on an emitter so you can emit sparks when the laser hits a surface.
Hope this helps :) Peter -
how do you break the hit result from the laser ? say it was set to 100m, the object hit was 50m away from the spawn point, how would you set the stroke length to 50m to hit the object in range ? plugging the falloff and range into the inputs does nothing as it outputs either a 0 or 1 value (Boolean)
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Not falloff, but on the last page of the laser gadget there is a hit distance output. Plug that into the end position of the stroke :)
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cant post pics but wired it up and it still sets it to full length, when an object isnt in the laser view the stroke is a 0m but as soon as something is in range of the laser it goes all the way to max length, tried taking the total length of the laser - the hit distance output then inverting to get the total distance to target and it just outputs 1, either its my bad maths or im missing something silly xD
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I'm getting the same thing. If I plug the output of Hit Distance into a Value Slider it just shows 1.0 if a detectable object is any where in range and 0 if it isn't.
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Add a Calculator gadget to check if Hit Distance Equals Zero, multiply the one-or-zero value from the Equals by the laser's Max Distance, and add that number to the laser pointer's Hit Distance.
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Mine is working. If you have a Laser scope with falloff distance that matches the length of the stroke, and run Hit Detected through a Signal Manipulator that inverts it, then plug that into the End of Stroke input.
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