Help me make this mouse-look script better.

Unity Engine
1

I’m currently working on an fps of sorts and have been trying to perfect my mouse look script. I want to make sure that the movement doesn’t feel jittery or sluggish, and I’ve written a pretty good script that works fairly well, however it’s still not as smooth as I’d like it to be. It also does this peculiar thing where if I move the mouse along the x axis, the view will bounce back a little bit from where the movement ends, giving a slight recoil effect which I’m not a fan of. I’d like some suggestions on how I could improve the following code:

public class PlayerLook : MonoBehaviour
{
    public float mouseSensitivity = 100.0F;
    public float clampAngle = 80.0F;

    private float mouseX;
    private float mouseY;

    private float rotationX = 0.0F;
    private float rotationY = 0.0F;

    void Start()
    {
        Vector3 rotation = transform.localRotation.eulerAngles;
        rotationX = rotation.x;
        rotationY = rotation.y;
    }

    void Update()
    {
        mouseX = Input.GetAxis("Mouse X");
        mouseY = Input.GetAxis("Mouse Y");

        rotationX += mouseY * mouseSensitivity * Time.deltaTime;
        rotationY += mouseX * mouseSensitivity * Time.deltaTime;     

        rotationX = Mathf.Clamp(rotationX, -clampAngle, clampAngle);

        Quaternion localRotation = Quaternion.Euler(rotationX, rotationY, 0.0f);

        // Am using this line to smooth out the movement, but it produces recoil effects along the X axis.
        transform.rotation = Quaternion.Lerp(transform.rotation, localRotation, 12f * Time.deltaTime);
    }
}
2

My bad. It seems it is not that code that produces the recoil effect, rather it occurs as a result of some similar code which I have attached to a cameraReference object, which rotates with the camera to ensure that the player follows the camera only along a horizontal axis. This is the code I made for that object:

public class CameraReferenceLook : MonoBehaviour
{
    public float mouseSensitivity = 100.0F;

    private float mouseX;

    private float rotationY = 0.0F;

    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {
        Vector3 rotation = transform.rotation.eulerAngles;
        rotationY = rotation.y;
    }

    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update()
    {
        mouseX = Input.GetAxis("Mouse X");

        rotationY += mouseX * mouseSensitivity * Time.deltaTime;

        Quaternion localRotation = Quaternion.Euler(0.0f, rotationY, 0.0f);
        transform.rotation = localRotation;
    }
}

I’m trying to figure out a better way to keep the player following the camera direction only along a horizontal axis. If I tell the player code that it’s forward vector is equal to the actual camera’s forward vector, my player flies upward if I aim the camera up. I use this cameraReference object instead, which can only rotate around the y axis, but it seems to interfere with my mouse-look code.

3

Alright, I found a solution to the cameraReference problem. I was able to get the player to move in the camera’s direction without following it upward or downward by inserting this blurb of code into my movement script:

var CharacterRotation = camera.transform.rotation;
        CharacterRotation.x = 0;
        CharacterRotation.z = 0;

        transform.rotation = CharacterRotation;

With this code I was able to do away with the cameraReference object entirely.
I was then able to fix the wobbly recoil effect by changing the last line in my PlayerLook Code to the following:

transform.rotation = Quaternion.Lerp(transform.rotation, localRotation, 2f * Time.fixedTime);

I’m not exactly sure why this fixed my problem, but there it is. I still think this mouse-look could benefit from some better smoothing, so I’m still open to suggestions.