[solved] Rendering lasers

[Lucius Q. User]

Hi, everyone!

I am currently writing a mod that has a "Laser gun", that when right clicked shoots a (potentially very long) beam. I have two questions about how to draw said beam.

1. Where should i put the beam drawing code? Create an EntityFX for it, somehow do it in the Item renderer itself (if so, than how?) or do arcane magicks with TESRs?

2. I want the beam to originate in a specific place of the gun's model. How do i convert the the "muzzle's" coordinates from model's coordinate system to world coordinates?

Edited June 19, 2017 by Lucius Q. User

[Draco18s]

A TESR will not help you here. TESRs are for blocks.

For this, EntityFX is probably the best route, although you could conceivably also hook into one of the render events and do it there too, but an Entity will automatically sync with all clients.

[Lucius Q. User]

Is it ok to have a somthing like 60 blocks long EntityFX? All the ones i seen in vanilla are usually very small. 

[Draco18s]

The only problem would be if the origin of the beam (where you placed the entity) was in an unloaded chunk for another player.

But other than that, probably not.  And you can fix that by breaking the beam up into smaller chunks.