Particle SYSTEM: SpaceShip On FIRE

Spaceship on Fire!

Objective: If the spaceship collides with asteroids, a fire ignites on its wings. 

• Since the player has 3 lives, One collision with asteroid will cause one fire, and the second fire on the second collision. On the third collision, spaceship will be destroyed. 

Two particle systems: FireRightEngine, and FireLeftEngine, were created. The process of creating a fire particle effect is similar to how I create a flame in the previous post. In this section, I want to focus on how we can use scripting to actually play or pause the particle effect. 

SCRIPTING

OBJECTIVE: Play fire effect on the right wing when asteroid hits the player first time. Then, play the effect on the second wing for the second hit. The third hit would destroy the spaceship. So that would be another section describing how we can destroy the object along with the destruction particle system.

PLAYERCONTROLLER SCRIPT

Although the particle system we create is put as a child of the player, the component is actually outside of the Player's component. So we need to set a variable in PlayerController.cs script that can cache the Particle System component. Similar to how we declare GameObjects, we can also declare ParticleSystem variables. Here, we have two fire particles, so let us create an Array.

ARRAY ELEMENTS REFERENCES

Now, lets go back to Unity editor and add elements into array we just created. I will add fireRightEngine as element 0 and fireLeftEngine as element 1. 

DECISION MAKING

We have already scripted a condition where a collision of spaceship with asteroid reduces the playerLife by 1 amount. Lets use that variable "playerLife" to decide which particle system to play. 

Condition 1: playerLife = 2 (i.e. First collision with asteroid) 

• play fireRightEngine, in our script --> fireParticle [0]

Condition 2: playerLife = 1 (i.e. Second collision with asteroid)

• play fireLeftEngine, in our script --> fireParticle [1]

Condition 3: playerLife = 0 (i.e. Third collision with asteroid)

• Game Over!

SCRIPT

With conditions set up above, we can now easily put it down in our script.