Like in the game Tanks! for the Wii, I wanted to replicate how the Green tank AI finds the correct spot to shoot at to get a good ricochet hit on the player. Demonstrated down below:
I found a bunch of math formulas to actually calculate a bounce angle, but how would I find which plane to actually shoot at? I can calculate where to aim based on a plane/block to ricochet off of, however finding the plane to base it off of in the first place is a difficulty I’m facing. I was wondering if anyone could take a crack at what they’d do in this situation or any tips on what I should do to sort the “best shot” scenario to aim around an object.
If it helps at all, this is basically how I’d calculate the angle. Which isn’t the problem here. I was wondering since like in original post, the map will have multiple blocks in it, how could I find which plane to utilize as the optimal ricochet plane?
(Just realizing this after posting, but the point B’ would be reflected to be the same distance that point B is from the wall, so the point here is a little off, but the idea is basically there.)
Are you talking about how I calculated the correct angle to hit a target at? Or how I made the bullets hit bank off walls? Both I can say really easily.
Banking off of walls is a like, two or three lines. I cast a ray out and when I detect an object to bank off of, I calculate the distance between both objects. If close enough it runs these two lines to calculate the new normal (direction) to move said object to.
currentNormal is the directional value in the direction of the bank off of an object.
As for calculating angles to hit a target? It’s a really bad method and it only worked for this game because there’s not much code running at the same time, I casted a ray 360 degrees around the tank and used the reflection calculation to calculate if it would bank and hit a target. I did this ray 3 times until it found a hit. If it didn’t connect with any player, then it wouldn’t count as a hit and it’d get a new angle to attempt. It sounds clunky but it caused the green tanks to be a menace and hit nasty shots.
Thanks for sharing, but sadly this doesn’t help me, as I need to be able to calculate it with a projectile that has an arc. Specifically I need to be able to bank a basketball off of the backboard with perfection.
That’d be someone similar to what I’ve done, all you have to do is account for gravitational fall in your equation. There are a lot of dev forum posts that talk about mapping projectile movements. I think it was EgoMoose or someone else who wrote an entire community tutorial on how it’d be done and including bounces, arcs, etc.
