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Sorting out graphical layers and tidying effects#71

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thompson318 merged 6 commits intost/rocket-launch-play-testingfrom
mm/rocket-launch-graphical-tweaks
Apr 20, 2026
Merged

Sorting out graphical layers and tidying effects#71
thompson318 merged 6 commits intost/rocket-launch-play-testingfrom
mm/rocket-launch-graphical-tweaks

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@mmcleod89
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I had to make some changes to get things to render clearly while I was reviewing your PR so I thought it would be best to merge them into your branch before it goes into the main if you're happy with them.

  • Assigns all sprites and particle effects to different layers so that they render on top of each other correclty
  • Turned on the gaze cross hair for now as otherwise it is challenging to check if the game is working and you can't see if you're doing something wrong
  • Toned down the flame effect considerably as it was extremely large and vigorous (much bigger than the ship)
  • Reworked the smoke particles so that they come out of the back of the rocket, collide with the launch pad, and pool around the ground.
  • Turned off the mouse control option for the launch since I coudn't get it to work (it seems to give over control of both the eye and head tracking to the mouse but they need to be doing different things)

@mmcleod89 mmcleod89 requested a review from thompson318 April 16, 2026 14:14
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This all looks OK to me, except for the frame rate counter which I'm not sure wasn't a commit error? (it also doesn't have a corresponding metadata file).
Sorry, I should have refined some of the scene defaults before pushing as I was developing using the mouse pointer option (which is very useful on Linux), but when you move back to using the eye tracker the values need to be tweaked.

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Did you mean to commit this? It looks a useful utility but I'm not sure it's used anywhere?

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I didn't initially intend to commit this but I think it might be useful as a utility; I wrote it so that I could get debug readings of the frame rates when looking into the ring buffer code so it might be worth keeping since we'll be working on that sort of thing quite a bit in the future and we want to make sure that it's not frame rate dependent (as the frame rate is not fixed)

@thompson318 thompson318 merged commit 87807f5 into st/rocket-launch-play-testing Apr 20, 2026
@thompson318 thompson318 deleted the mm/rocket-launch-graphical-tweaks branch April 20, 2026 07:59
thompson318 added a commit that referenced this pull request Apr 20, 2026
* Countdown time prefab can't be easily paused, so create our own timing system

* Only reduce time if gaze is steady

* You need to move head and hold gaze in order to decrement the timer.

* Added adaptive difficulty setting for gaze point

* Put gaze and speed logic in one object, to avoid having to call between them,

* tidy up launch animation

* Tidy up code into more discrete functions

* Added some adaptive difficulty based on the number of games played

* Added a sprite scale and move based flame effect.

* Flames nicely sized and follow rocket at launch

* Added gantry, flame and ground sprites.

* Some smoke particles

* A smoke emitter on each side

* Tweeked defaults and add a smoke scaling option.

* Add a scaling factor, because I can shake faster than I nod

* Implement an adaptive difficulty function.

* Grouped variables and updated docs.

* Sorting out graphical layers and tidying effects (#71)

* Sorting out graphical layers and tidying effects

* Reduce flame growth

* Turn off unused circle collider

* Remove frame rate counter

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Co-authored-by: mmcleod89 <michael.mcleod@ucl.ac.uk>
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2 participants