non-rigidbody velocity wrong in x-axis

Questions & Answers
1

I’m creating an animation controller that I want to use on lots of different game objects. All of which would have different controllers (physics, navmeshagent, user input, etc). I want to use the transform.localposition in order to get forward velocity relative to the object (ie. local). What I have works great except when an object moves directly in the x-axis in either direction. At that point it shows a velocity of nearly 0 (even if moving quickly). I’ve gone through all the forums and tried basically all the different options but nothing is working. What am I doing wrong?

See below for my latest code attempts all of which show similar results.

option #1:

Vector3 previousPosition;

float forwardVelocity(){    
        Vector3 curMove = transform.localPosition - previousPosition;
        float curSpeed = curMove.magnitude / Time.deltaTime;
        previousPosition = transform.localPosition;
        return curSpeed;
}

option #2:

 if(Time.deltaTime > 0){
        currentPosZ = transform.localPosition.z;
        historyPosZ = posHist;  
        locVelocity = (transform.localPosition.z - posHist)/Time.deltaTime;
        posHist = transform.localPosition.z;
        return locVelocity;
    }
    else{
        return 0.0f;
    }

option #3… uses rigidbody and still doesn’t work. I would rather not use rigid body though as not all objects in my game need it.

currentVelocity = transform.InverseTransformDirection(rigidbody.velocity).z;
2

whydoidoit: See the picture below to demonstrate my point. Both world and local velocity describe the velocity of the object but the local velocity rotates it’s coordinates in relation to the direction that the object is facing. So you can see in the example image that the same velocity described both ways ends up with two different values. The world velocity has a negative z value where the local velocity has a positive z value.

1374-velocity.jpg