Intro part (you can skip it if you want nothing important, but i recommend you read it)
Hello Everyone, I’ve been making an fps game for a while now and when it was time to add gun tracers (such as the ones in Phantom Forces or the game Blood Engine) i really came to a struggle. I tried using physical parts with velocity and trails, but this didn’t work too well (very bad method btw - saying this from experience, only use it for slow projectiles).
I tried using other methods but no success, I don’t see that many people talking about this, so i decided to just make a tutorial cuz why not lol.
(We will be using beams btw)
Anyway lets begin with our tutorial, I will try to make it as simple and as easy to understand as possible, but remember some scripting knowledge is needed so keep that in mind.
Step 1!!!
Set up the beam
- Grab two parts and set their collision to false, transparency to 1 and etc.
- Add attachemnts to both parts and a beam, then name the first part “Part1” and the second one(the end destination one) “Part2”
- Ok now we need to customize the beam, i wont go too much in detail since it will be a waste of time, but i will share my properties
Tadaaa
This should be your final result or at least something similar to it
Step 2
Set up the code
Now we will be doing this ON THE SERVER SIDE
- Set up your working space, organize your tracers like this so
(highlighted part) (Att1 and Att0 are basically Part1 and Part2)
Now I suppose you already have a gun system in place, I will show you pieces of code used in my own game for the tracers. The following code can be used by anyone. Anyway it will consist of a function that can be called to summon a tracer
local function Tracer(a: Attachment, HitPos : Vector3, dist: Number)
task.spawn(function()
--"a" is our starting attachment AKA - the muzzle of the gun
--"HitPos" is our end position. Assuming raycasting is used, this would result in it being the position of where the shot hits
--"dist" is the distance between the muzzle/player and the HitPos, in this instance we are precalculating it OUTSIDE the modular function
local attachment0 = game.ReplicatedStorage.GunResources.Tracers.Part1.Attachment:Clone()
attachment0.Parent = a
local attachment1 = game.ReplicatedStorage.GunResources.Tracers.Part2:Clone()
attachment1.Parent = workspace.Terrain
local tracer = game.ReplicatedStorage.GunResources.Tracers.Att0.Beam:Clone()
tracer.Parent = a
attachment1.Position = HitPos
tracer.Attachment0 = a
tracer.Attachment1 = attachment1.Attachment
tracer.CurveSize1 = (dist / 30) + (dist / 30)
tracer.TextureLength = dist / 3
task.wait(.05)
attachment0:Destroy()
attachment1:Destroy()
tracer:Destroy()
end)
end
Example Usage :
local dist = (ray.Position - gun.Muzzle.Position).Magnitude
local a = gun.Muzzle.Attachment -- The start point of the tracer - where the tracer's path starts
Tracer(a, ray.Position, dist)
Now since our code uses beams, it should work with viewmodels too (if the physical gun is reattached to the viewmodel, instead of the viewmodel being a separate rig)
THIS SHOULD NOW BE OUR FINAL RESULT (Video taken from my game still in development so it don’t judge) (These are not the best tracers but as i said you can customize the beam and if you are a scripter you can change my code too, but i believe this is a good base)
Sorry for the very poor video quality and fps but trust me in game it looks A LOOOT better
FIRST PERSON
Third Person
NOTE : I am not the best scripter, i can argue that i am a pretty good one but no the best, so if any bugs are found, please report them in the replies and i will answer every one of you with hopefully a solution
Hope you found this helpful and i’d be cool if you drop me a follow @RobloxerAndany (aka FangOne2) 