Effective 2.5D Seeker Missiles?

Hi,

I’ve been working on a “2.5D,” physics game.

The current challenge is getting realistic player seeking missiles.

The player is, lets say a rocket, and is controlled with ridged body gravity, then a key press triggered relative constant force for thrust, along with rotation for changing direction.

For the seeker missiles i started by making them look at player for direction and the just a transform forward vector for speed. But the results were very unrealistic, ugly and just not fun to play - you are dealing with propulsion, gravity and pitch. But these missiles don’t follow these rules - so then i lowered the vector speed, added ridged body gravity, and a constant speed thrust like the player has (removing all the vector speed made the missiles completely erratic.)

This produces very realistic looking missile movement, however, because of this fight between transform scripted movement, and physics calculated movement, it has made it pretty jerky, the “look-at” is very sharp, and jitters as it turns, and the trail render is very sharp and jittered aswell.

What i would really like is smooth rotation (with a buffer to limit it from making super sharp turns) and keep this realistic movement but without the nasty side effects.

Can anyone suggest a more efficient & proven way of doing this?

Any help would be very appreciated,

Thanks.

-G

Have you looked at Quaternion.RotateTowards? It seems like it does exactly what you want, here. Combine it with some kind of interpolation, and you’re set!