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Shards Summoner

- You have one wish...
- Can I summon spikes out of nowhere?
- Granted!


Pick your favorite way to impale your enemies: Stone cones transmuted out of the ground / Nanites-crafted metal spikes / Golden lances summoned by your legendary weapon / Ice picks formed by your cryogenic powers / Wooden thorns spreading underground / Bone shards called by your shamanic ritual / Sand spires you control mentally / Lava geysers piercing the ground / Pointy darts of blood magic / Reality-shattering shadow fragments / Condensed holy light crystals

Big thanks to stringie for the hand ^^

Demo video by Dr HHI

TOOLS
- Shards: You have the ability to summon shards out of the ground (or out of thin air).

KEYBOARD CONTROLS
- [T]: Change summoning pattern.
- [LeftClick]: Summon shards (hold).
- [K]: Remove all shards.
- [O]: Open options menu.

CHARACTERISTICS
- Shards are unbreakable.
- Each summoning pattern has its own effect:
-- Line: Shards are summoned out of the ground in a straight line.
-- Paintbrush: Shards are summoned out of the ground, following your cursor.
-- Wave: Shards are summoned out of the ground in a fan shape (up to a full circle).
-- Trap: Shards are summoned out of the ground in a circle shape around your cursor.
-- Ring: Shards are summoned in the air forming a ring around the center of the object.
-- Shpere: Shards are summoned in the air forming a sphere around the center of the object.
-- Blade: Shards are summoned in the air forming a blade between you and the object.
-- Wall: Shards are summoned in the air forming a wall between you and the object.
-- Whip: Shards are summoned down from the sky in a straight line.
-- Rain: Shards are summoned down from the sky, following your cursor.
-- Storm: Shards are summoned down from the sky in a fan shape (up to a full circle).
-- Tornado: Shards are summoned down from the sky in a circle shape around your cursor.
- A single click can lead to interesting results with Sphere/Wall pattern.
- Retractation delay also includes the time left for the shards to settle down after deployment, so reducing it too much may prevent shards from deploying fully before they retract.
- Be careful when increasing propagation speed, or also increase space between Shards.

KNOWN BUGS
- Shards may be summoned at weird angles that do not respect the option settings defined: This is due to the game physics, can't fix.
- Spawning too many Shards will lag your game, and eventually crash it (use that clear button).

DEV NOTES

Originally posted by About this mod:

Now that is one of the mods that took me the longest to complete X)
Starting with the shard shape itself: I finally took some time to dig a little into the map editor, and learn how to make basic shapes inside it and export them to a xml that I can edit through script :D This was not easy but I ended up with a satisfying spike shape that I was able to retexture at will in the mod code, which was really nice ^^
Then came the shard physics, I made several tests and had to make choiced in order to get the intended effect (spikes breaking stuff as they come out of the ground). I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was working almost on its own if the spike was a dynamic object, so I sticked to this option. The counterpart is that al ldestruction is physics-based and involves collisions, so it will sometimes result into some glitchy angles when the spike tries to deploy or retract through a hard material :/
I also had a little bit of trouble to be able to give the intended orientation to the shard when it spawns based on the settings... I originally tried to do all of that with quaternions as the game provides those, but I had a really hard time to figure out how to properly rotate an object on world axis (not on its own local axis), so I ended up coding my own simpler functions to compute and set angles on each axis >_<
After that I had a few patterns in mind to deploy the shards that I added progressively: The Line one was for sure the easiest, just a point moving in the air at the designated speed ans spawning shards under it when enough space has passed since the last shard. Derive from this one came the Paintbrush pattern that simply change the direction of that floating point all the time to make sure it points in the direction of the cursor hit point. The Wave pattern was the most complex, I originally tried to make it spawn each arc of the fan shape at once, but that was way too laggy, so I ended up making that progressive spawn that starts in the center of the fan and goes to the sides, which is way slower but also way more freindly for your FPS :p Finally I added the Sphere pattern that is a little bit overkill, but very satisfying to look at :p
And last but not least: The HAND! I can't thank you enough stringie for making that animated hand model XD I am way too lazy to come up with something like that myself, and it took me quite some time to find an actual 3D hand in a mod on the workshop (a lot of hands you see are actually only images), but I was really happy when I found that one :p Although the animation system you made is quite helpful, I'm still not quite sure how you figured out those angles and positions for each finger... I did mines the hards way by trial and error an small adjustments over and over again X) Anyway I now have the perfect spell-casting hand, for all the magic-based mods I can dream of ;)