On my current project (3d 3rd person shooter) I now want to add tracers firing every 7 bullets or so. But I'm not exactly sure how they look, when i think of them i think of a streak of light, but are they white, yellow, orange, or red? Also how transparent should i make them? and how long?

thanks for any help,
~namoreh

Quote:Originally posted by Namoreh
On my current project (3d 3rd person shooter) I now want to add tracers firing every 7 bullets or so. But I'm not exactly sure how they look, when i think of them i think of a streak of light, but are they white, yellow, orange, or red? Also how transparent should i make them? and how long?

All this really depends on how you want them to look. Try a few different settings and see how each one looks.

Tracers in automatic weapons are usually best every third round at least, as that's the standard burst setting and is frequent enough to see where you're aiming. A tracer specificly is a burning bullet; something along the lines of Oni's long yellow particles would work wonderfully. Just make them arbitrarily long and fast particles generated every % 3 shots...?

Though Oni was anime-style. Hmm.

(no, this does NOT require a particle engine, system, or instance)

-"Sta7ic" Matt

I like the white streaks I have in Black Shades with every shot

Not realistic but just make it easier to tell what's going on.

Thanks for the tips, for now i decided i'll have white, yellow, and orange, depending on the weapon, pistols are white, rifles are yellow, and automatic weapons are orange, it looks kinda ok at the moment, ill have to do some tweaking...

im still a long way from a beta though, stupid enemies are always doing ridiculous things (like flying into the sky ), and most of the textures are wacky (although the tanks that drive around have perfect moving tread textures ).

thanks,
~namoreh

edit: grammer

Quote:Originally posted by Sta7ic
Tracers in automatic weapons are usually best every third round at least

this is wrong. the maximum recomended is 1 in 4. any more than that and you foul your bore. For your basic automatic rifle the tracer looks like an orange line from the muzzle of your weapon to where it impacts. You can't really tell that it "moves" you just see a line flash in front of you and there's no "glow", just a line. During night fires our paper targets often caught on fire from the tracers. The round also burns for a little bit when it comes to rest behind the targets, assuming it's not buried. Tracers are harder to see during the day.

I suggest taking a look at saving private ryan's opening scene in slomo. That makes pretty cool bullet traces. I also wouldn't make them more frequent that 1/7, especially for automatics, especially for vehicles and heavy machine guns.

I agree, SPR's opening scene had cool effects, they still lacked a little bit of realism to me. But hey, if all you're going for is cool effects, they this might be the way you want yours to look.

If you want to go for realistic, take a look at Black Hawk Down; they kept everything pretty down to earth; as for tracer color, they can be yellow (or is that orange, can't remember?), red or green, depending on the chemicals used.

In Vietnam, we used the standard yellow tracers and the Vietcong (sp?) used green.