Develop Reference

Unity3D Position and Rotation matching on Waypoints

I have a simple waypoint system. It uses a transform of arrays that act as the bucket what holds the waypoint values.
I use this waypoint system to move a camera throughout a scene by moving towards one point to another. The scene is not big - so everything is close to each other.
The camera moves from one position to another by button click/press. This works fine.
void Start()
{
//Sets the Camera to the first point
Camera = GameObject.Find("Main Camera");
Camera.transform.position = patrolPoints[0].position
currentPoint = 0;
}
//Fixed Update seems to work better for LookAt
void FixedUpdate()
{
//Looks at initial Target
Camera.transform.LookAt(TargetPoints[0]);
if (click == true)
{
Camera.transform.position = Vector3.MoveTowards(Camera.transform.position, patrolPoints[currentPoint].position, moveSpeed * Time.deltaTime);
//Camera.transform.rotation = Quaternion.Slerp(Camera.transform.rotation, patrolPoints[currentPoint].transform.rotation, Time.deltaTime);
Camera.transform.LookAt(TargetPoints[currentPoint]);
}
}
public void onNextClick()
{
if (currentPoint >= patrolPoints.Length)
{
currentPoint = 0;
}
if (Camera.transform.position == patrolPoints[currentPoint].position)
{
currentPoint++;
click = true;
}
}
I am having difficulty with one aspect of the transform that I haven't talked about yet. That is the rotation.
I have used lookAt for setting up the target of the first look at point and that works. However when it runs to the next target in the look at array - the change is sudden.
I have tried an Slerp in the shot as well - and this works when the waypoint has been placed in the appropriate rotation value - and the value Slerps from one position to the next. However, the timing isn't quite aligning up yet. Some position transitions get there quicker - meaning the rotation is trying to get caught up / while others are lagging behind.
I have tried getting the distance between the current waypoint and the next waypoint and treating that as an overall percentage in the update relative to the current position of the camera - I believe this could help work out how far the rotation should be orientated given the position update.
However, I am somewhat lost on it. Many examples suggest looking at iTween - and I wouldn't imagine this would work - however, I want to get into the math a bit.
Can anyone put me in the right direction?

Looks like the Lerp for Position and a Slerp for Rotation done the trick.
MoveTowards wasn't playing ball with a Slerp on rotation - so I believe the timings weren't aligning.
if (click == true)
{
Camera.transform.position = Vector3.MoveTowards(Camera.transform.position, patrolPoints[currentPoint].position, moveSpeed * Time.deltaTime);
Camera.transform.rotation = Quaternion.Lerp(Camera.transform.rotation, patrolPoints[currentPoint].rotation, moveSpeed * Time.deltaTime);
I've been led to believe the lerp values work like a percentage of such - so the same input value works for it.
Finally I used a range on the distance between current position and update on the click - this helped speed up the button click.
if (Vector3.Distance(Camera.transform.position, patrolPoints[currentPoint].position) < PositionThreshold)
{
currentPoint++;
click = true;
}
Thank you for your time.

Mouse drag direction tolerance

I'm working on a 2D game where the player can drag tiles around. It works in a way that the player clicks and hold a tile and depending in which direction the player moves the mouse from then on, the drag direction is decided.
The problem however is that this is overly sensitive. It might often be the case that the player starts dragging and wanted to drag vertically but due to the mouse sensitivity it turns out to drag horizontally (or vice versa).
Does anyone have an idea how to add a tolerance threshold to this dragging behavior? The relevant part in my code looks basically like this:
private void Update()
{
if (_isMouseDown && sourceTile != null)
{
_isDraggingTile = true;
/* Determine drag direction and drag target cell. */
Vector3 dragDistance = Input.mousePosition - _originMousePosition;
dragDistance.Normalize();
if (_dragDirection == DragDirection.None)
{
float f = Vector3.Dot(dragDistance, Vector3.up);
/* Mouse up drag. */
if (f >= 0.5f)
{
_dragDirection = DragDirection.Up;
_dragTargetCell = sourceTile.gridCell.upNeighbor;
}
/* Mouse down drag. */
else if (f <= -0.5f)
{
_dragDirection = DragDirection.Down;
_dragTargetCell = sourceTile.gridCell.downNeighbor;
}
else
{
/* Mouse right drag. */
f = Vector3.Dot(dragDistance, Vector3.right);
if (f >= 0.5f)
{
_dragDirection = DragDirection.Right;
_dragTargetCell = sourceTile.gridCell.rightNeighbor;
}
/* Mouse left drag. */
else if (f < -0.5f)
{
_dragDirection = DragDirection.Left;
_dragTargetCell = sourceTile.gridCell.leftNeighbor;
}
}
}
if (_dragTargetCell != null)
{
// Take care of moving the dragged tile!
}
}
}
Simply delaying the calculation of dragDistance by some frames doesn't turn out to work very well. I think what is needed is a solution to figure out the mouse movement and decide on which axes it moves farthest. Determining the drag direction as above will probably never work out well.

The problem with any collection of information is noise. In your case, the noise is defined by the wrong movement of the user. Nonetheless, it should be possible to minimize the effect of noise by averaging the values.
There are advanced algorithms used in DSP but I guess a basic averaging of the info should do in your case.
What you could try is that instead of moving in Update at once like you do, collect movement over several frames, then average all those frames and see if it goes better:
IEnumerator GetAverageMovement(Action<Vector3> result)
{
int frames = 0;
List<Vector3>list = new List<Vector3>();
while(frames < 30f) // half a second appr
{
list.Add(GetDirection());
frames++;
yield return null;
}
result(AverageAllValues());
}
GetDirection is just returning the delta between current and previous position, AverageAllValues simply adds all values in list and divides by list.Count (aka 30).
This should fix cases when the user move all the way right but a bit up at the end. The last bit should be canceled by the large right movement.
If that is still not enough, then you could add some logic within the method that if a value is too far gone from the average, discard it. I don't think you need this in there.

I think you should create a Queue of positions with limited size right after dragging .
by comparing final value of Queue and first value you can find the direction.
If you want to get better results you can get Variance of positions and get better results.

Unity3d get Mouse Input Axis

I want to rotate a GameObject through mouse movement between -20° and +20°.
I know that there's a possibility to grab the smoothed Input through
Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"); and Input.GetAxis("Vertical"); which returns float values between -1 and 1
It would be nice if there would exist something like
Input.GetMouseAxis("Horizontal"); or Input.GetMouseAxis("Horizontal");.
But I the output shouldn't be influenced by keyboard.
I'm sorry that I don't have much experience with Unity and its API.

is the mouse in unity "captured" in screen resolution or how should I
scale the mouse Position to a value between -1 and 1 ?
In this case the "normalizedSpeed" will be your target
public float mouseDistance;
public Vector2 mouseDown = -Vector2.one;
public float normalizedSpeed;
public void Update()
{
if(Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0))
mouseDown = Input.MousePosition();
if(Input.GetMouseButtonUp(0))
mouseDown = -Vector2.one;
if(Input.GetMouseButton(0))
normalizedSpeed = mouseDown != -Vector2.one ?
Mathf.Clamp((mouseDown - Input.MousePosition()).sqrMagnitude, 0, (mouseDistance * mouseDistance)) / (mouseDistance * mouseDistance)
: 0;
}
i use sqrMagnitude instead of distance because the sqr root call in distance() takes alot of memory, so it is faster to compare the squared distances vs each other
Also keep in mind im wirting this as a pseudo-code so the overall idea is what im going for, im leaving you syntactically responsible for the implementation ;)

Tracking mouse movement and magnitude

I'm making a simple game where the player controls a tank. The rotation of the turret will be controlled by mouse movements. The code currently looks like this:
if (Game.MouseState.Y < yMovementBorder)
PossessedTurretPitchValue += dist;
if (Game.MouseState.Y > yMovementBorder)
PossessedTurretPitchValue -= dist;
if (Game.MouseState.X < xMovementBorder)
PossessedTurretYaw += rotationDist / 6;
if (Game.MouseState.X > xMovementBorder)
PossessedTurretYaw -= rotationDist / 6;
xMovementBorder and yMovementBorder are values representing the midpoint of the game screen. The problem is that any movement of the mouse will cause the turret to turn until its maximum pitch/yaw angle. How can I make it such that it will be able to read the mouse movement as well as its magnitude(ie: slight movement of the mouse will only cause a slight pitch/yaw movement of the turret)?

In your update method, you should store references to your previous mouse state and current mouse state. Then use these two variables to figure out how much the mouse moved since the last update. It will take some tweaking to get it just right, but try something like this:
//define your private variables
private MouseState prevMouseState = null;
private MouseState currMouseState = Game.MouseState;
public void Update(GameTime gt)
{
prevMouseState = currMouseState;
currMouseState = Game.MouseState;
//calculate how much the mouse has moved since the last update
var dX = currMouseState.X - prevMouseState.X;
var dY = currMouseState.Y - prevMouseState.Y;
//do your rotating depending on the values of dX and dY
}

I think what you want to do is set limits based on how far from center the mouse is.
Like:
if (Game.MouseState.Y < yMovementBorder)
if (PossessedTurretPitchValue < yMovementBorder*someFactor)
PossessedTurretPitchValue += dist;
And similarly for the other three cases.
Without setting a limit, any deviation from the center will cause the turret to move. It will be moving all the time, and eventually rail somewhere. This is what your code does now, if I understand correctly.

mouse picking a rotating sprite in an Xna game

I am working on a simple game where you click on square sprites before they disappear. I decided to get fancy and make the squares rotate. Now, when I click on the squares, they don't always respond to the click. I think that I need to rotate the click position around the center of the rectangle(square) but I am not sure how to do this. Here is my code for the mouse click:
if ((mouse.LeftButton == ButtonState.Pressed) &&
(currentSquare.Contains(mouse.X , mouse.Y )))
And here is the rotation logic:
float elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds;
RotationAngle += elapsed;
float circle = MathHelper.Pi * 2;
RotationAngle = RotationAngle % circle;
I am new to Xna and programming in general, so any help is appreciated.
Thanks a lot,
Bill

So you're trying to determine if a point is in a rectangle, but when the rectangle is rotated?
The Contains() method will only work if the current rotation is 0 (I guess currentSquare is a rectangle representing the image position without rotation?).
What you will have to do is do the opposite rotation of the image on the mouse coordinates (the mouse coordinates should rotate around the origin of your image), then calculate if the new position is within currentSquare. You should be able to do all of this using vectors.
(Untested)
bool MouseWithinRotatedRectangle(Rectangle area, Vector2 tmp_mousePosition, float angleRotation)
{
Vector2 mousePosition = tmp_mousePosition - currentSquare.Origin;
float mouseOriginalAngle = (float)Math.Atan(mousePosition.Y / mousePosition.X);
mousePosition = new Vector2((float)(Math.Cos(-angleRotation + mouseOriginalAngle) * mousePosition.Length()),
(float)(Math.Sin(-angleRotation + mouseOriginalAngle) * , mousePosition.Length()));
return area.Contains(mousePosition);
}

If you dont need pixel pefect detection you can create bounding sphere for each piece like this.
var PieceSphere = new BoundingSphere()
{
Center =new Vector3(new Vector2(Position.X + Width/2, Position.Y + Height/2), 0f),
Radius = Width / 2
};
Then create another bounding sphere around mouse pointer.For position use mouse coordinates and for radius 1f. Because mouse pointer will be moving it will change its coordinates so you have to also update the sphere's center on each update.
Checking for clicks would be realy simple then.
foreach( Piece p in AllPieces )
{
if ((mouse.LeftButton == ButtonState.Pressed) && p.BoundingSphere.Intersects(MouseBoundingSphere))
{
//Do stuff
}
}

If you are lazy like me you could just do a circular distance check.
Assuming mouse and box.center are Vector2
#gets us C^2 according to the pythagorean Theorem
var radius = (box.width / 2).squared() + (box.height / 2).square
#distance check
(mouse - box.center).LengthSquared() < radius
Not perfectly accurate but the user would have a hard time noticing and inaccuracies that leave a hitbox slightly too large are always forgiven. Not to mention the check is incredibly fast just calculate the radius when the square is created.