Interacting with environment

Unity Engine
1

I’m setting up a game where the player can interact with various characters in the world - I need a way for the player to ‘click’ or otherwise interact with the game characters. Is there a way to detect where the user is ‘looking’ (when using mouse-look?) or for them to click on the game character? So that I can use that as a trigger to initiate some behavior on the part of the game character?

Any help’d be appreciated! (I’m utterly new to Unity, but am a half decent programmer)

2

Hi Purplexis,

I am not sure what you actually mean. Do you want pathfinding, so that the character walks to a designated area? Or?

3

If what you want is to detect when clicking on a game character, you might want to have a look in the Examples folder at the Ragdoll Example. In the example you can click on the Ragdoll and throw him around. It is actually quit fun :slight_smile: Should I be worried about my mental state?

4

Lets see if I can help. The game uses a first person camera, we have other non-playable characters in the game. When the user navigates the game, he will come across these characters, is there a way that when a user looks at a character and clicks, we can trigger an action such as an animation or sound.

5

I have a few questions for the really smart people on this. Assuming your “click” is any click regardless of where the mouse is:

  1. Could you cast a vector forward from your character, then on each of the other possible characters get their position, then compute the angle between. Accept if the angle is in a predefined range?

  2. When an object is not being rendered by the camera is there someway to determine this? Is the object still active, or is there a visible property some place, or a list of the objects being rendered by the camera, or something?

Just thinking out loud and hopefully not cluttering the thread :slight_smile:

6

Couldn’t you just cast a ray from the camera and see what it hits? If it hits your character then play the animation/sound. I think the thing to look at is ScreenPointToRay in the Screen class? I have never done it but that’s how I figure it should work…

Hope that helps,
-Jeremy

7

Another thing you could check is the distance between them…

var distance = Vector3.Distance(thePlayer.transform.position, theTarget.transform.position);

if (distance < 10) {/*rotate thePlayer to face theTarget and do your thing*/}
8

Ahh, thanks - I’ll try casting a ray out from the camera.