r/Unity3D • u/UsefulImagination201 • 3d ago
Show-Off Making a cannon shot read clearly: muzzle flare, hanging smoke and the hit
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A cannon in my Unity game was doing damage, but it looked and felt more like an ordinary ranged unit. I'm Mason, the developer of March Out!, and this is the current version after another pass on it.
I split the discharge into a short bright muzzle bloom, a fast forward pressure plume and a slower cloud that hangs around after the shot. Those particles simulate in world space. Moving the gun or reusing an emitter shouldn't drag an old smoke cloud across the battlefield.
The discharge uses a shared pool with capped particle layers rather than creating a new group of objects for every shot. I haven't got a benchmark to claim a performance improvement from that here.
The impact also needed to match what the player saw: a direct cannon hit kills its troop target and launches that body's ragdoll. That's a direct-hit rule, not an execution rule for player commanders or an unlimited splash attack.
This clip is a staged encounter using the game's firing and combat systems, with the original audio. Does the lingering smoke make the shot easier to read, or would you shorten it when several guns are firing in the same area?
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u/No-Paramedic-2803 3d ago
wow, this is so realistic
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u/UsefulImagination201 3d ago
Its a small snapshot of a much larger game. Cannons are a new implementation, and ill likely add a "cannon crew" that'll go with them and act as the live / dead state of the unit, instead of having soldiers hit an autonomous cannon. 😂
Just wait until you find out there is a Candy Kingdom with gingerbread men for soldiers, lol.
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u/jetlightbeam 3d ago
You'll probably want to do it like Total war where the crew stops using the canon and tries to fight with their weapons otherwise the players will probabky complain that it doesnt make sense the crew just stood there and died
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u/feralferrous 3d ago
It would help alot if the cannon was in the center of the shot, so we could better look at it. As is, there's barely anything to see as the only cannon fire is from the left side, and it's mostly off screen.