Godot 4 vfx lab - projectiles

This lab iteration builds up on the scene started a few months ago, in this article, where I threw together a bunch of FSMs, animations, particles, sprites, shaders, pathfinding and whatnot.

What basically started as a show-room for 3D particles, evolved into a shooting range, in which I slapped a character equipped with a particle attractor and adjusted the camera's environmental settings to push the ambient post-process glow.

Video quality goes up to 1080p but may be set to lower by default, please adjust this setting using the player's "gear" menu.

3C character-camera-controls

Notable interactions and collisions using GPU 3D particles
Most of the wobbly and energy effects seen are fine-tuned instances of nojoule's energy shield shader [1]
The 4th projectiles - icicles? - use a combination of particle attractors and ballistic velocity to modify gravity early in their trajectory - this results in a curvy movement which can be further controlled with extra 3D areas on the receiver end.
This somewhat of a failed attempt at homing missiles which revealed funny interactions with particle attractors, so I kept this asset as an example, inspiration, and TODO material (see below).

Bomb - pink - these slow projectiles are shot by pairs and explode in a large area.
semi-auto rifle - green - short bursts of 10 rounds
full-auto rifle - yellow - fires smaller and faster projectiles continuously
missile - blue - curve trajectory, perfect for aiming above walls but trickier to shoot overall

TODO

beam - extend to deal damage over time at impact
ray - connected to one or more targets
shotgun - deals damage in a cone
stream - apply elemental effect at impact (eg: flamethrower)
hitscan - immediate impact

Teleportation - 3D assets from Kenney's Mini dungeon [2] and Binbun VFX [3] [4]
This room uses Grid maps for geometry - walls, traps, rocks, etc each have their own layer with custom scaling and materials - and regular 3D collision areas to detect when the player character steps into a portal.

Distance fade
The shader material disappears as the camera gets closer - pulsing fx was added to highlight seamless interactions with other effects.