Detonator Explosion System

Back in 2009 I wrote the Detonator Explosion System and it's been used in a lot of Unity projects. In fact if you look at the URL it was apparently the very first asset that Unity submitted to the Asset Store.

However that was a really long time ago, especially in Unity years! Well recently I have been able to dedicate some time to maintaining it and this thread will serve as my contact point with the community.

Please post any bug reports and feature requests in this thread. Thanks!

EDIT 9/25/2019 - Detonator 2.0 for is live for all current versions of Unity (4.x - 2019.x) in the Asset Store. TheRealGrendel has been working with me at Frame Interactive to get it updated.
Asset Store Link: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/1
GitHub Project: https://github.com/benthroop/Detonator

 

Downloaded this link, but the problem with normal maps continue.

 

Dr Jellyface - try the version that was just posted to the Asset Store, or grab it via the Dropbox link in the first post.

 

Thanks very much for this awesome asset.

The update I just grabbed from the asset store did not complain about normal maps not being flagged correctly.

There is one issue I'm not sure how to address. When you click on the cube wall to trigger an explosion, there's a brief pink flash coming from the click point.

This was happening in the previous version as well.

I've attached a screenshot.

I'm guessing there's a material not setup correctly or maybe a missing texture.

How do I correct this?

 

Schmosef, are you in Unity free by any chance? That might be the heatwave which requires render to texture. I didn't test on free... maybe I should. Anyway, try grabbing that Dropbox link at the top of the thread. I reassigned the materials in Unity 4.0 so it might work better now. Let me know.

 

Nope, I'm on Pro.

I'll try the drop box link and let you know if it's any better.

 

Ok, I tried it. The pink is the same.

I forgot to mention before that if you reduce the detail level slider by about 10% the pink flash goes away.

 

I just did a build for Windows Store. It works!

There's no pink flash either.

It's kind of slow on my Tegra 3 based SurfaceRT, but it works.

 

So it works in your build but you still get pink in the editor? You should be able to tell what object it is by pausing the game and selecting it. Let me know which object it is if you can. Thanks!

 

Sorry, I should have thought of that. It looks like the "Heatwave" object.

 

Just following up because it would be great to get this working.

When I look at the HeatDistort shader in the inspector, the attached error is displayed.

I'm guessing that this is what's causing the pink flash. My graphics card is an nVidia 660GTX. Maybe you have an AMD based card?

Is there anything I can do to fix the shader or remove the pink flash?

 

Schmosef, there's a new version up. Give that a shot? Sorry for the issues. I have an Nvidia based card as well (750m).

 

I tried the new version yesterday. Same issue with the shader.

Is there a way to disable it?

 

This means now Detonator works using the new particle system?

 

Good question.

 

I tried adding some explosions to the 2D game created in this tutorial. However, the explosions always appear behind the decoration. I tried playing around with the Z value and also tried setting the sortingLayerName in code but neither worked. Any ideas what could be causing this?

 

@Novack - Detonator still uses the legacy particle system.

@ThiefMaster - Detonator creates a lot of child objects that don't inherit their layer from the parent Detonator object. This is lame and a good feature for next release. I've attached a patched Detonator.cs that will do this. Replace the current Detonator.cs and you should be able to set the layer of the parent object it will inherit. Let me know how it goes.

 

Am I the only one having trouble with the heatwave shader?

 

@schmosef - are you on Unity free? What is your video card?

 

I'm on a Unity Pro subscription. My card is an NVidia 660 GTX.

 

Hmm... can you go make a new project, redownload the package through the asset store, import it, and tell me if you still get the pink. Specifically, you should NOT get the warnings about texture import when you import the package. If you do, then somehow you've still got an old version. Let me know how that goes.

 

Sure, I'll try it now.

 

I tried a new project and I had the same problem.

The issue is not with texture importing. It's with the HeatDistort shader.

I found this thread with other people talking about the same problem. I made the shader code change suggested by @Chronixxas and it seems to work.

 

You simply need to remove the .xyw

Old code:

Code (csharp):

1. half4 col = tex2Dproj( _GrabTexture, i.uvgrab.xyw );

New code:

Code (csharp):

1. half4 col = tex2Dproj( _GrabTexture, i.uvgrab );

 

can i use them commercially in my game for free?

 

and will you share with us in which tool you created them and how?

 

Yes, like all other Asset Store assets, you can use it for free and even without attribution.

 

I am very glad by listing this reply .
Thanks for making such a great think like this .
Keep up the good work!

 

Thanks for making this! This has saved me several hours of work to get good looking explosions!

Any ideas on rotating the Detonator-Upwards prefab so that the plume is in a direction other than world up?

 

On the main Detonator component there is a checkbox "Use World Space". I think that will work but I haven't tested it in a long time!

 

Will play around with it some more. Thanks again!

 

Is this compatible & smooth on mobile platforms?

 

For the love of me, I can't remove the explosion force. I don't want the explosion to be affecting the rigidbodies at all, and I've even gone as far as removing all lines of code involving the keyword "force."

I still can't get it to not push/blow away objects!

Help.

 

Hi all,

I ran into the same pink plane problem, google took me here, I fixed issue by changing the line to

1. half4 col = tex2Dproj( _GrabTexture, i.uvgrab );

However, it seems it only render quarter (or half) of the heatwave!? I've tried this fix and the 2-line fix in another thread but still only show a portion of it. Please see the attached image. This is an awesome demo, thanks so much for putting this together!!! Please help me with the final step, how do I get it to show the whole heatwave like the one in the demo, many many thanks!

best,

 

Noob question: how are the collisions done? I have poked around but can't seem to find the collider or whatever.
Using Unity 5 Free version.

 

small bug : Camera.main not always assigned, for example in multi camera setup

 

First of all, great work! I currently have two questions:

1. How is the performance on mobile devices?
2. The spray always seems to fly towards the main cam. This looked awkwards in situations where I scaled up the whole component and moved the cam far away from the explosion. Can I make it behave differently?

 

Yes, that also happened to me. So I tagged multiple cams as the main cam. No problems till now. Just have to make sure that there is only one of these active at a time, I guess.

 

I have another question: For a given detonator with detonator spray, I would like to set the max size for all its particle emitters at runtime. It seems when instantiating the prefab, the game objects with the particle emitters are not there yet. Any hint regarding that?

 

Hey Everyone,

FYI that this does work in Unity 5 - there are just a few scripts that don't work. Specifically, they are the heat wave and shock wave scripts. If those are disabled, there are no issues visually.

Thought I'd mention it but would rather see a Unity 5 update for this package!

 

Thanks very much for the unity 5 compatibility tip, and I agree that a full unity 5 update would be great, but considering that this is a free asset I do not if it will happen, or at least soon, he offered kindly this great, amazing and powerful asset with beautiful explosions for frèe

 

I'm updating one of my older games and the plan is to update/optimize Detonator to use the latests particle system as the current system appears to be quite a performance hit in the profiler. Although an official update would be great!

 

I really like this detonator, but I have the problem that no particles appear if I build a Mac .app file.
It works fine on a Mac in the Editor and also fine on a PC in the Editor and in the build .exe file, but not in a Mac .app file build. Any ideas?

 

In case anyone has missed it, the "Particles" scene in the free Standard Assets Example project for Unity 5.x is very similar to this asset.

 

I found a solution for my problem. I had to go to ProjectSettings -> Graphics and add 2 needed particle shaders. Otherwise they can't be found in the Mac .app build.

Example picture:

 

Probably best to raise that as a bug as they should be automatically included.

 

if I use the test scene in the same project, they will be added automatically. But if I use the test prefabs in my own project they are not added. But only in the Mac build. In the pc build all is running fine.

 

OK I have my attempt at the basic Detonator-Insanity explosion as a prefab using the Particle System.

Should give you something to work with -> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19148487/Detornator/detornatorInsanity.unitypackage

Please share your improvements and hopefully we will be able to update the detonator package over time.

 

Hey @benthroop
i like your detonator system. But sometimes i encounter crash on ios:

Code (CSharp):

1. Can't add component because class 'EllipsoidParticleEmitter' doesn't exist!
2. UnityEngine.GameObject:AddComponent(String)
3. DetonatorBurstEmitter:Awake()
4. UnityEngine.GameObject:AddComponent(String)
5. DetonatorFireball:BuildFireballA()
6. DetonatorFireball:Init()
7. Detonator:UpdateComponents()
8. Detonator:Start()
9.  
10. [ line 38]
11. (Filename:  Line: 38)
12.  
13. NullReferenceException: A null value was found where an object instance was required.
14.   at DetonatorBurstEmitter.Awake () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
15.   at UnityEngine.GameObject.AddComponent (System.String className) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
16.   at DetonatorFireball.BuildFireballA () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
17.   at DetonatorFireball.Init () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
18.   at Detonator.UpdateComponents () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
19.   at Detonator.Start () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
20. UnityEngine.GameObject:AddComponent(String)
21. DetonatorFireball:BuildFireballA()
22. DetonatorFireball:Init()
23. Detonator:UpdateComponents()
24. Detonator:Start()

Using unity3d 4.6.7p2, iOS 8.4

 

I'm really impressed with Detonator! At first I thought it was broken in Unity 5. Placing all of its assets into the "Resources" folder fixed everything though.