You know what this reminds me a bit of?  The aliens from Edge of Tomorrow

The fuse, recently implemented, shortened and lengthened the "rope" as the fuse got shorter. That was pretty cool - see earlier video. I went back to the rope, but kept the lengthen shorten code - by accident, really - and adjusted the particle generation a bit. And now we have this just super-cool looking and incredibly fun/destructive weapon that lets you just decimate everything on the screen. It's actually quite fun, and that pulsing effect is way interesting; it doesn't look like rope or math at all anymore. Just some really weird superweapon. So neat.

Really interesting to change the video settings and watch at 0.25 speed - particularly at (say) 0:36 onwards. You get a good idea of all the stuff that's happening, and how the "organic" movement is achieved with course pixel resolution.

This is a first attempt at representing a "fuse". I put a sort of sparkle (basically randomly generating particles) at the end of the rope, and decrease the length of the rope as it's animating. When it gets zero-size I reset it to full length. Interesting effect. A fuse, though, could be a very interesting/useful game mechanic. For bombs, for example

Stress-testing the rope. Here with 124 elelments. Not much useful for anything, but clearly the system is capable of handling this many particles.

WenHop - the Search for Planet X, Copyright (c)2023 Andrew Davie
Free for personal use. Must not be sold or redistributed.

The rope and particle system are now separated. The rope is a "weapon" selected through double-click (menu) and then click again. It may be turned on/off via this seuqence. When the rope hits a rock it turns to geodoge, and a geodoge turns to a dogecoin. Dirt is vaporised.  Here you see a number of game components running together. There's a little slowdown happening, particularly when the screen gets super super busy. You may see a spiral of particles from the wyrms, from the rope hitting objects, and of course all the various actions that happen from the player.


This is a copyrighted work. Please do not redistribute the binary; linking to this site/page is the way to share my work. TY.

Using the "rope tool" - first example of actual tool use via tool icon/menu...


Here's a sequence where the "rope" might be used as a tool. In this case we start up in a world full of boulders. Yes, you can pick-axe each boulder but it takes ages. However, if you double-click, then the tool menu comes up (the circle icon) and if you select that then your rope tool is enabled. As the rope(s) spin around, when the tips hit a rock, the rock changes to a geodoge. If they hit a geodoge, it changes to a dogecoin.  So the "rope tool" is a pretty cool transmogrifier which gives you dogecoin where there were apparently none, and it's a great way to clear out an area to blanks.  Double-click again, and your tool menu comes up and you can disable the tool, as shown a few times in the video.

There are a number of things I can tweak with the "physics" of the "rope" object, including inertia ad rotation characteristics. They end up affecting how the visuals look as it whips around.

In this version I've slowed down the propogation so it's a much gentler, smoother movement. I've also added some experimental gameplay items; the very tip of each rope will change a geodoge into a rock, and back again. And if there's a blank sapce, the tip will leave a dust "sparkle".  It's very interesting.

See https://woodgrain.taswegian.com/ for updates to this project.

Although I have a limited number of particles (in terms of storage for their x/y positions), I do have greater capacity as far as drawing goes. I can draw more particles than I have memory for, in other words.

This is one example of particle re-use; here I am multiplexing the coordinates to get mirrored particles. It's a neat effect.  The up/down movement is correctly tied to the player movement; the left/right has issues so that's why it's glitchy when I move to the side.

It's really neat visually. I don't know if/how I could use it in gameplay.

A study in rope dynamics; the propogation of kinks in the rope is now blended, which makes it look a bit less like water pouring out of a hose, and more like an actual rope. What's interesting here is how everyting looks super-blocky and clunky when it's running slow, but the eye smooths it all out into fluid movement and "higher resolution" when it's full-speed. It's good now; I should move onto something else.

V2 of rope. Nice!

I like when it seems like YouTube is exclusively for WenHop...

Here's a first pass at some code to use the particle system for a rope object. Or a whip. Or an electical arc. Whatever. Basically grouping the particles together with a few parameters to adjust the position between each. Looks quite interesting.

I might have a go at one with just "2600" to identify it. I like simple 3D printing projects. The ones in the pictures do look quite well printed.

Here's a little bit of fun with particle movement. I can see some sort of "shoot-em-up" working with this.