3d sidescroller making projectile coplanar and hitting animated objects

[colbydanesaddoris]

I’ve been working on a 3d sidescroller shooter… using IK I can aim at a target in 3d space … projectiles fire from the muzzle of an equiped gun… and hit the 3dtarget… no problem…

But for the actual game play I want the projectiles to hit any target along it’s path… ( currently using ray tracing for collision of bullets with other colliders)

I’d like to have the projectiles hit any object … ignoring the depth to an extent…

So I make the projectile coplanar with the character… set the position.z of the bullet and 3dtarget.z to 0… which is the center point of all interactable objects…

This works fine ( although the visuals are off a bit)
Character colliders are hitboxes that follow animation. so if the current animation moves the depth of the hitbox enough the projectile misses even though visually from the side it looks like it hit.

With the way I have this set up it is the expected behaviour…

Anyone have other sutions to always hit? It’s almost like taking a dimension away from the positions …

Thanks

[Kurt-Dekker]

One way is to stop using 3D colliders and go to 2D colliders, as those all exist at z == 0. This would require some work, especially if you use those colliders for other things.

Another way is to make the 3D colliders large enough in the Z direction that they always get hit, but that might have other issues.

Still another way is to iterate ALL the colliders that you CAN hit (via some central list of them) and cast a fresh ray that matches their Z at them going in the same X/Y direction and see if it hits.

To the point of the last choice, remember this about Raycasting, colliders, planes, Plane, etc:

(Help)How can i detect how many raycasts are hitting an object?

There are many types of 3D raycasts. One is the generic Physics one: hits anything in the scene Another is one that lives on a collider. If you know which collider you care about, you can use that collider instance to see if a ray hits it. That way you not only know that it hit, but because you are already asking "Did anything hit this collider?" you also know what collider it is. These are some of the types of 3D raycasts: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics.Raycast.htm…

Keeping a plain/terrain within the view frustrum

You can get rays from the camera at a given spot, so one approach is to cast rays from the camera corners and make sure they hit your terrain, or hit your terrain bounding box. To ignore screen pixel dimensions and just get the corner rays, this is the API you want: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Camera.ViewportPointToRay.html The nice part is that it doesn't matter how your camera is set, how your field of view is set, etc., It just works. You can use this to raycast and hit p…

Randomly placing objects near polygon collider 2D

Epoch! I always love your posts because you’re always working on the next thing. Awesome. So for this I would pick a random spot from left to right at the top of your screen, then raycast down to “hit” the terrain and see how high it is at that point, and from that you can emplace your missile above the ground, or on a pedestal or whatever. Remember there are various flavors of Raycast in Physics2D: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics2D.Raycast.html “Tell me if I hit any 2D col…

[colbydanesaddoris]

Thanks… I actually thought about doing the first two…

Now I am actually leaning towards using a boxcast instead of a raycast. I would make the box very small in the x/y but extend the z as much as I need…

[Kurt-Dekker]

@colbydanesaddoris

I would make the box very small in the x/y but extend the z as much as I need…

That would actually be a pretty clever approach too!