Check if angle is in bounds?

[Aurarus]

Hey I’d like to make something that checks if a certain angle facing out from a point is within appropriate bounds.

I’m not sure how to even begin approaching this, so I’m curious if there’s some kind of simple way to do this.
If there was a way to reduce the angle between a part’s forward facing direction (unit) and a new angle in relation to that (view below) to a single number or value

It should then be easy to do something where you can get a true or false on something based on whatever “angle boundary” you want like so:

This is for cannons in a game I’m making. Curious what solutions you guys would use for this, because anything I can work up right now is extremely sloppy.
Also, since I’m working with cannons, if it’s possible to get a returned value on “closest in boundary direction” that would be an extra challenge

[Aurarus]

Is Vector3:Dot perfect for this?

Found something kinda relevant: When do I have to use Vector:dot() or Vektror:cross() and what exactly can I use them for in 3D space (workspace)? - #2 by fret13103

[Pxxm (Driver)]

Dot Vector is what your exactly looking for as it returns a scalar between two positions which can be converted to an angle if im not wrong with math.acos

[Aurarus]

For sure
However, finding the nearest angle that is in bounds seems to be trickier than I thought

EDIT:

How to check if an object is within an angle of the front of a player’s characters?

The first thing you want to do is to work out which direction the player’s character is facing: local Facing = Character.HumanoidRootPart.CFrame.LookVector Then you want to get the direction from your character to the object: local Vector = (Object.Position - Character.HumanoidRootPart.Position).unit Then you can get the angle between those two vectors using the equation:

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What this means is that the cosine of the angle between vectors u …

Might have found what I was looking for

[starmaq]

You can use the dot product another way. If you had two unit vectors a and b, the closer a:Dot(b) (or b:Dot(a) because dot product commutative) gets to 1, the more they’re on the same direction. If they’re not looking in opposite directions, the value should be between 1 and 0.

What you can do is, first check the value of the dot product for a vector that’s exactly on the edge of the angle boundary, say a 60 degrees angle. That would be a:Dot(Vector3.new(0,0,math.cos(math.rad(x)))), where x is your angle, 60 degrees in our case, and a is your part’s lookVector. Then you simply check if a:Dot((b-a).unit) is <= less or equal to a:Dot(Vector3.new(0,0,math.cos(math.rad(x)))). (b-a) is the vector between your part’s lookVector and the position to check if in bounds, (b-a).unit is the direction of that, because we need both a and the second vector to be unit vectors.

local part = --your part
local lookVector = part.CFrame.lookVector
local angle = 60
local threshold = lookVector:Dot(Vector3.new(math.cos(angle),0,0))
local position = --position inside or outside of bounds
if lookVector:Dot((lookVector - position).unit) <= threshold then
    --something
end

[Aurarus]

Yeah using two units seems to be the best approach
This is a lot easier with say only left/ right angles, but I’m trying to think of a way that covers the up/ down trajectory too without creating another pair of units.

I’m still completely dumbfounded how to do the clamping without a ton of checks and extra units
Bear in mind I won’t be doing this every frame so I can afford a bit of a complex calc

My big challenge right now is converting the “up down” angle of an out of bounds trajectory into in bounds