Quote Originally Posted by ize
Hi there. I'm still trying to work out why it has to face the camera all the time. Wouldn't that just make it appear 2D like a sprite

Wouldn't say your attempt was pathetic , You could use a gldisc at the "base" of the laser which always faces the camera to give it a sort of glare and then draw the plane as you have. You could also use a couple of glshaders to give it a glow effect.
Because it's a engine remake, and i need to use existing texture that look like this:



These are then colored to match specified phaser emitter color by the engine.

Well actually, the game i'm rebuilding is even more complex (size was intentionally exaggerated to make the shape and complexity more obvious).




But i'll be happy if i can draw a quad facing the camera for now, when that works i can work on more complex shapes.

The project is opensource, and has a sourceforge project here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/st-sc

No releases yet, but i can get you a working demo if anyone is interested.

Right now my game renders these phasers with TGLPipe in a solid color, but the pipes don't have any uv mapping and cannot draw quad lines, so they are unsuitable for this use.

This is how they look with Tglpipe: