Tank Tread Marks
A top-down vehicle rolls a wandering path and lays paired tank-track cleats that slowly fade behind it, kicking up faint dust. Move your pointer to steer the tank and click to gun the throttle for a dust burst.
Build a self-contained, performant Canvas 2D visual effect in a single React + TypeScript component.
Effect: "Tank Tread Marks".
Description: A top-down vehicle rolls a wandering path and lays paired tank-track cleats that slowly fade behind it, kicking up faint dust. Move your pointer to steer the tank and click to gun the throttle for a dust burst.
Current settings: speed = 70, turn rate = 1.6, track fade (s) = 9, dust = 1, color = Single, hue = 150, second hue = 90.
Tags: Canvas 2D, trail, pointer-reactive, pooled, vehicle.
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.