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/main.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!
3. Look at the demo/demo_main.collection for examples of how to use Hyper Trails. trails_from_factory is a good example of how to use the asset from code using a single controller script.

Example App

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

🕹️ View the demo online 🕹️

Settings

Available options:

• follow_object_id hash - ID of the game object to follow. If empty, uses the current object.
• absolute_position bool - Default is false, i.e. we assume that the object with the trail has the same position as the followed object. If true, trail vertices in the mesh buffer are positioned relative to the last position of the object.
• use_world_position bool - Default is false. If true, uses world position instead of local position for the followed object.
• trail_width number - Width of the trail in pixels.
• trail_tint_color vector4 - Color and alpha of the trail (RGBA).
• segment_length_max number - Maximum length of a trail segment. If > 0, segments exceeding this length will be split.
• segment_length_min number - Minimum length of a trail segment. If > 0, segments shorter than this will be merged.
• points_count number - Total number of points in the trail.
• points_limit number - Maximum number of visible points (0 = all points visible). DEPRECATED.
• fade_tail_alpha number - Number of points to fade at the tail (0 = no fading).
• shrink_tail_width bool - If true, trail width decreases from head to tail.
• shrink_length_per_sec number - Rate at which the trail length shrinks per second (0 = no shrinking).
• texture_tiling bool - If true, texture repeats along the trail; if false, texture stretches.
• trail_mesh_url hash - URL to the mesh component used for rendering the trail.
• (only for trail_maker.script) auto_update bool - 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.

Important

Vote for [https://github.com/defold/defold/issues/7277](the 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.