Keep forward directon in line with path

Question

I have a somewhat side scrolling game I am working on and I am having a difficult time figuring out how to keep the players forward direction in line with the terrain path as it is not always going the same direction.

Below, if you look at the second image you will see that their forward isnt following the path which should point to those platforms, but it points off to the side.

How can i go about accomplishing this? The current way I am trying is to use a spline and keep the forward direction of the player the same as the spline but it doesn't seem to work as good as i was hoping. Possibly i am just doing it wrong.

alt text

Answer 1

Answer by jogo13 · Jan 13, 2013 at 08:38 PM

An easy way to align along a path is to LookAt a point slighty ahead on the path:

 Vector3 lookat_target = // you just need a point slightly ahead of current position
                         // (however your personal spline/path implementation calculates it)   
 
 transform.LookAt(lookat_target);

Add comment · Show 1 · Share

Mungyun · Jan 18, 2013 at 04:04 PM 0

Share

Yep thats pretty much what i am doing with my spline point being ahead of my player. See my comment to Loiuzein =-)

Answer 2

Answer by Loius · Jan 13, 2013 at 08:48 PM

I use a spline for movement+facing as well; what's your code look like? I use 4-point bezier curves, but it's the same idea - use the difference in curve(@X+1) - curve(@X) to determine the direction at time X.

Add comment · Show 1 · Share

Mungyun · Jan 18, 2013 at 04:03 PM 0

Share

Sorry this may sound confusing as I cant really describe this all that well. But, using SuperSplines, I kinda got it working by having the current point in the playerLookSpline slightly ahead of the player and when the player moves along +z or -z I set the speed of the SplineAnimator to a positive or negative value respectively.

$$anonymous$$y main problem with this method is that I have to keep guessing at the speed the 'saPlayerLookDirection' should be, as the splines speed vs my players speed are not the same. So currently all i am doing is

saPlayerLookDirection.speed = -moveDir.z Time.deltaTime playerPathSpeed;

Where moveDir is to deter$$anonymous$$e if the player is moving forward or backward and playerPathSpeed is the variable i use to slow down or speed up the lookAt point on the spline.

I think i got this working relatively well but does this seem like a decent way to go about it? Never really tried such a thing so Im not sure if there is a better way to handle this

Keep forward directon in line with path

2 Replies

Your answer

Welcome to Unity Answers

Follow this Question

Related Questions