Slow Motion Plugin for Godot 4.x

A Godot plugin to automatically manage temporary slow motion effects

Applies temporary slow motion globally (by gradually changing Engine.time_scale), with smooth slowing down and speeding up ramps.

Ramps and overall duration are controlled using time from the OS, so they are not affected by the slowing itself, giving you guaranteed easy control on the duration and speed of the slow motion effect.

This plugin will also slow down shaders, so VFX using the TIME builtin playing alongside will also follow neatly. (There is currently no way to add exceptions for certain shaders to escape the slow motion. Sorry about that - it's an engine limitation.)

Usage

Install and activate plugin (might need to reload the project as well).

For the simplest case, just call

SlowMotion.slow_motion(duration, speed)

from anywhere, where duration is in seconds, and speed is the time scale between 0.001 and 1.0.

This will slow the whole game down to the given speed, including a slow down ramp (in this case for 20% of the time), and a speed up ramp (in this case for 40% of the time) sustaining the slow speed for the remaining time (in this case 40%) in the middle. The duration given is for the overall effect, including the ramps.

Example, for a 3 second slow motion, reaching time_scale=0.1 at its lowest:

SlowMotion.slow_motion(3.0, 0.1)

Custom Ramp Times

You can provide your own ramp times:

SlowMotion.slow_motion(duration, speed, ramp_slowing_down, ramp_speeding_up)

The example below causes the same effect as the previous one (since it uses the default values of 0.2 for slow down and 0.4 for speed up):

SlowMotion.slow_motion(3.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.4)

Overlapping Effects

It might happen (it will happen in any action game) that a slow motion effect triggers while another one was still playing. You can decide what happens by setting the overlap_mode property from the autoload, before calling the next effects:

SlowMotion.overlap_mode = <one of SlowMotion.OverlapModes>

Example:

SlowMotion.overlap_mode = SlowMotion.OverlapModes.REPLACE_IF_SLOWER_USE_LONGEST_DURATION

Available options are:

If you want to change the behaviour only for one specific case, you can add an extra argument to the end of the call:

SlowMotion.slow_motion(duration, speed, ramp_slowing_down, ramp_speeding_up, custom_overlap_rule)

Example (has the same effect as first one, since it still uses same as default values):

SlowMotion.slow_motion(3.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, SlowMotion.OverlapModes.IGNORE_NEW_EFFECT)

Demo Scene

The plugin comes with a demo scene file, showing how to control other nodes using slow motion data (example with graphical representations of speed and values), as well as showing how to also control an AudioStreamPlayer's speed to match the slow motion.