Mirror Bounce (puzzle/tower defense style)

Unity Engine
1

Hey everyone!

so i guess this is my first post around here (definitely not the last!) and of course i have questions, questions and more questions…my current project ( ok, lets cal it a challenge, my knowledge on scripting is really small) is a simple puzzle/tower defense game…

the concept is to have a grid or a terrain where you place mirrors and rotate them, then a object or particle (a lightbeam) is fired from point A and has to bounce (or reflect, a more correct way to explain it) on the mirrors on the right angle forming the correct trajection to point B

i been doing some research around the community to make such idea work in unity script wise and kinda found some stuff i could use…

unity’s standard drag and drop rigidbody for placing the mirrors, i stil need to figure out how to make it so that when i click on a button on the GUI a prefab of the mirror(object) is instantiated already on the cursor so you just click somewhere on the grid and drop the object (tower defense style)…

1 in-game rotate script (to be able to tweak the mirror angle so that the lightbeam bounces in the right direction)
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/17848-3D-Translation-and-Rotation-widgets-in-game - if i could extract just the y axis of only the rotation tool, this would be awesome
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/40802-How-to-detect-held-down-mouse-button-on-a-GUI-Texture - this could be an alternative aswell

i still need to figure out how to make the object or the particles (not sure what will work best, particles would make a nicer effect, since the idea is for it to be a shiny light beam, but im thinking that perhaps using a gameobject instead would make my life easier, is that correct?) bounce when hitting the mirror collider, and more specifically…bounce exactly perpendicular to the angle that it comes from, so that the gameplay is logical and realistic enough…i read somewhere that “Vector3.Reflect” might be what im looking for…

so, can anyone give me some insight on how i can get those ideas to work?

thanks for the help!

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2

This would be could using the built-in rigidbody physics and colliders. You wouldn’t have to calculate the bounce angle yourself, it would bounce for you. Note you’d probably want to turn gravity and drag to 0, or very low to get light-like behavior. Attaching a particle to the collider would be pretty straightforward.

If you want precise calculations, or to add features later like lenses which are more than a simple bounce, then, yes you could calculate all the bounces yourself using the built-ins like Reflect. You would not be using the physics engine in this case.