Trail Managers

Trail Managers / Trails

Trails, known in the code as TrailManagers, are groups of bones on creatures that make parts of the creature flow naturally and gracefully through the water. Most large fish in Subnautica use them, including the Sea Emperor.

Here is a video by a developer showing trail managers working in-game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HY6S9uMnMs&ab_channel=sewlek

Note how the Reaper Leviathan's tail is not rigid.

Here is an example of trail managers NOT working in-game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-VH3PL91FI&ab_channel=sewlek

Trail managers can be added easily by calling the CreateTrail method in your CreatureAsset's AddCustomBehaviour implementation.

CreateTrail has two overloads. One simply takes in a GameObject and creates a trail out of that GameObject and all of its children. The other overload lets you manually define the bones that will be inclued in the Trail Manager (make sure they are in order!).

CreateTrail returns a TrailManager so you can make any more adjustments to the newly added component if needed.

It WILL require some adjusting to work right and I would suggest looking into the Runtime Editor mod.