Top-Down Tank Tutorial: Movement

 

    I made a simple little top down tank a while ago, and some parts were hard, some were easy. I thought I would share how I threw it together. So, first thing is first. We're going to talk about how the player gets the tank to move around the map.

 

 

    The controls for this tank are split into two main parts, basically turn and move. This chunk of script is built to rotate the body of the tank. We'll start with the top bit first. On Keyboard Input set to Hold, meaning the script will fire continuously while the A key is being held down. That's linked to a Cooldown block set to 0.02 seconds. I didn't want the tank to spin around too fast, and the Cooldown is there to regulate that. After that, we can see a Rotate block set to self and rotating -1 on the X axis, meaning the tank will turn left relative to itself.

    The second line on this chunk, coded to the D key with a positive 1 on the X axis, is obviously meant to turn the tank right.

    This bit moves the tank forward (relative to itself, not the world or camera). Again, we're using the On Keyboard with a Hold setting, linked to W for forward. Again, a Cooldown block so this isn't firing every frame, and then we are going to a Set Velocity block to move the tank forward. (Note that the tank needs to have a collider and a rigid body for this method to work.) 

    Down on the lower portion, we have a Get Forward block attached to This, so the script can figure out where the front of the tank is. That's fed into a Multiply block and pulling the tank speed from Object variables (which is set to 5 for this tank) and then fed to the Set Velocity block. So, the tank is given a continuous velocity of 5 in the "forward" direction as long as the player holds W.

    The Back portion of the script is virtually the same as the Forward chunk, except you can see the tank speed is multiplied by -1 before it is fed into the whole velocity thing. So, the tanks speed is set in the negative and the direction is reversed. Giving it a second look, I wish I had set the Cooldown slightly longer to make the tank reverse slower than it moves forward, but that's just a little personal preference. 

     That's it for now. Come back soon to lean more about how this tank works. Maybe throw me something on Ko-Fi and I can justify making some more Visual Script write ups. I have a lot of other half-baked scripts to share.