Top Down Tank Tutorial: Mouse Tracking

 

    Now for a very important piece of the top down tank, the jank way I make the turret track the players mouse. We'll start from the simple bits and get more fiddly from there.

    I think I've mentioned this method before in the NPC Turret Tutorial, but we'll go back through anyway. There is an empty object attached to the tank called the Sight. It's only job in the world is to look to where the mouse beacon (Mouse_Sight) is in the world at any given time so the turret can get the coordinates. So, On Update -> Look At: Variable - Mouse_Sight. All simple and good.

    Just like the sight, we're having this chunk of script fire every update because we want the turret pointing constantly at the players mouse. We're grabbing the rotation (Get Rotation) from the mouse sight from the panel just above (Object Variable: Sight) and then taking only the Y and W coordinates from that rotation data. The turret in this game is essentially 2D and stuck on the Y axis. No need for Z and X.

    We're taking the Y and W to create a new, more basic rotation and then forcing the tank turret (Set Rotation) to adopt that rotation. Still pretty simple.

     So, with this we are essentially treating the view as a 2D image, getting the position of the mouse on the screen, and the projecting that (Physics - Raycast) down until it hits something (Raycast Hit - Get Point). There is an invisible object in the game we mentioned earlier called the Mouse_Sight that this script is attached to and this script is constantly moving the object to where it thinks the mouse should be landing in the scene so the turret can track it. It's sort of a pain in the ass.

     Last an most important bit, you need to set the Field of View in your camera to 20 or higher. The higher that number, the broader the plane from which your mouse can project and the more accurate the mouse tracking will be. It is lower than 20 by default. So, make sure to fix that.

     That's it for now. I'll try to have what I expect to be the last part up next week. If this is helping, maybe throw me something on Ko-Fi, or buy a Kaiju game. I'll probably keep making these either way.