Homing Missile Trail
Guided rockets launch from the screen edge and curve toward drifting target motes, trailing a glowing fading streak and a dashed lock-on line, then pop in a small impact burst on arrival. Auto-launches on a loop. Click to set an aim point and missiles home to your pointer and detonate there.
Build a self-contained, performant Canvas 2D visual effect in a single React + TypeScript component.
Effect: "Homing Missile Trail".
Description: Guided rockets launch from the screen edge and curve toward drifting target motes, trailing a glowing fading streak and a dashed lock-on line, then pop in a small impact burst on arrival. Auto-launches on a loop. Click to set an aim point and missiles home to your pointer and detonate there.
Current settings: missiles per launch = 2, launch rate = 1, speed = 1, turn rate = 1, trail length = 24, color = Single, hue = 30, second hue = 200.
Tags: Canvas 2D, missile, homing, trail, pooled, click.
Requirements:
- Use requestAnimationFrame with a delta-time (dt) step, clamped to avoid jumps on tab switches.
- Render crisply: fully clear the canvas every frame (clearRect). Do NOT fake motion blur by painting a translucent background each frame, because that causes permanent 8-bit "ghost" burn-in. If you want trails, store each particle's recent positions and draw them as an explicit fading tail.
- If many short-lived particles are spawned, use an object pool (pre-allocate, reuse, swap-remove on death) to avoid GC pauses.
- Scale the backing store by devicePixelRatio (cap ~2) and handle resize.
- Pause when the tab is hidden or the canvas is off-screen; respect prefers-reduced-motion.
- Expose the listed settings as adjustable props/controls.