Contrails describe the trail effects which commonly follow projectiles, or emit from model markers like the Banshee's wingtips. They reference a bitmap to be rendered at repeated intervals and can be affected by wind and gravity using point_physics.

Limits

Contrails are represented in-engine as series of connected points. There is a limit of 1024 such points existing at any given time, meaning contrails may stop generating if there are already many in the scene. Lower the point generation rate if this becomes an issue.

Setting the point generation rate to 15 per second or higher can cause visual artifacts in the contrail since point generation is framerate dependent and can conflict with the game's tick rate. Modern client mods will modify the effect in-engine to prevent this.

Related HaloScript

(render_contrails [boolean])

Structure and fields

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following individuals for their research or contributions to this topic:

• gbMichelle (Limits)
• Kavawuvi (Invader tag definitions)
• MosesOfEgypt (Tag structure research)