![]() ![]() The next step is to turn off the particle system’s “Play on Awake” checkbox, which can be found towards the bottom of its main settings. Later, if you want to go for a different look, it’s easy enough to simply create a custom material and even use actual sprites to use as particles, but for the time being, let’s keep it simple. ![]() Ideal for what we’re trying to do for now. In the Render portion of the Particle System, select the Default Particle Material, which, by default, creates a small circle with soft edges, using an alpha blending shader that is optimized for particles. Make sure to disable everything in the component settings, except for the Render entry. Then we add an empty game object to the scene in the Unity editor and add a Particle System component to it via its “Add Component” button. Let’s create a new 2D scene adjust the camera like in the screenshot below, creating a simple dark blue color backdrop. It does not get much more efficient than that, so let’s get to it. In fact, we’ll turn the entire particle system emission process off and instead, we will simply make use of its rendering capabilities so we can draw hundreds of stars on the screen in a single batch. The good news is that we won’t be dealing with any of the confusing parameters. As such, particle systems can be very overwhelming and it may, in fact, be a component you have as of now stayed away from. ![]() ![]() Ordinarily, a particle system is set up so that it will continuously emit particles that are then moving around the screen in a fashion that is determined by the many, many parameters the component provides. Fortunately for us, Unity already has a component that is tailored to creating thousands of individual objects on the screen, fully optimized for performance-the Shuriken Particle System. We could create a couple of sprites and plaster them on the screen, but having a thousand game objects in your Unity scene, just to provide a backdrop is a bit excessive and unmanageable, not to mention the processing overhead this would incur, having to regularly update the thousands of scripts that would accompany each individual game object. The ApproachĪ good-looking starfield will require a couple of hundred stars, if not thousands, in various sizes an colorations. Ultimately, your imagination is the only limit in terms of some of the effects you might try to recreate. We can add various effects to give it depth and wonder-just take a look at some photos taken by the Hubble telescope and you’ll see how vibrant and colorful space really is. All it needs, really, is a slightly new perspective how to tackle the problem, and, using the processing power of GPUs, we can do a whole lot more, creating an endlessly scrolling starfield that is a feast for the eyes. We are no longer directly working with screen buffers in today’s world and the classic technique no longer works as such. Because the screen coverage was much lighter than drawing a background consisting of bitmaps and required only individual pixel draws for the stars, it was extremely effective and freed up valuable CPU time for more important things, such as more enemies, explosions, and action on the screen. They were moved at different speeds with each frame update to create the illusion of depth. In the olden days, starfields were created by writing individual pixels, representing the stars directly into the screen buffer. Time to remedy this because scrolling 2D space shooters are still every bit as much fun as they were 30 years ago. The traditional techniques that were typically applied to create these endless animated backgrounds at a minimal cost no longer work in modern environments, especially in game object-oriented frameworks like Unity, Unreal or Lumberyard. It is a backdrop that is continually generated as players direct their ship through space, annihilating swarms of approaching enemy vessels. Many classic, scrolling arcade space shooter games used a technique that is commonly known as an endless starfield. ![]()
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