Hyper Trails

Easy to use and customizable trail effect for the Defold game engine.

To draw a trail, Hyper Trails asset creates a buffer, sets the buffer to a mesh, updates the buffer on every frame update.

⚠️ Requires Defold 1.4.3 and newer.

Feel free to ask questions: the topic about this asset is on the Defold forum.

Installation

You can use Hyper Trails in your own project by adding this project as a Defold library dependency. Open your game.project file and add the links in the dependencies field under project:

• https://github.com/indiesoftby/defold-hyper-trails/archive/master.zip (or point to the ZIP file of a specific release)
• https://github.com/KorolevSoftware/defold-faststream/archive/refs/tags/beta_1.0.zip

Usage

Using it in your 2D game is simple:

1. Add the components /hyper_trails/trail_maker.script and /hyper_trails/models/trail_mesh.mesh to your game object.
2. Run your game and move the game object. Enjoy!

Example App

See the demo game.project for examples of how to use Hyper Trails on its own.

🕹️ View the demo online 🕹️

Settings

trail_maker.script's options:

• use_world_position (boolean) - Calculate object movement delta using go.get_position or go.get_world_position.
• trail_width (number)
• trail_tint_color (vector4)
• segment_length_max (number)
• segment_length_min (number)
• points_count (number) - any number.
• points_limit (number) - Set 0 to use all points (deprecated).
• fade_tail_alpha (number)
• shrink_tail_width (boolean)
• shrink_length_per_sec (number)
• texture_tiling (boolean)
• trail_model_url (url)
• auto_update (boolean) - Uncheck this and send the update message to the script instance to manually update the trail.

Change mesh's texture0 to draw custom texture on the trail.

Known Issues

Trail Position Lag

Defold now has such the update order so a trail head position will always be lagging behind for:

1. Physics-based objects (see the picture below).
2. Objects animated using go.animate().

Tip: You can disable the Auto Update property for the trail maker instance and check the demo/demo_physics.script how to manually send update message to the trail maker script.

Note: vote for [defold/defold#7277 issue).

Credits

Artsiom Trubchyk (@aglitchman) is the current Hyper Trails owner within Indiesoft and is responsible for the open source repository.

Contributors

• Dmitry Korolev (@KorolevSoftware) - rewrote the asset to use buffers and to create buffer resources dynamically in runtime.
• @vbif1 - various bug fixes.

License

MIT License.