Tank Tactics -- getting distracted by bells and whistles

Okay, so I have to admit, I dig the WarThunder Ground forces kill cam. And I'm attempting a rough duplication of it here. I'm learning a lot about shaders, rendering things always on top, and about the Animation class in Unity. Though I was a little disappointed by swapping materials through animation, this seemed broken, and I don't know why, other than in code, you have to swap the entire material array, and not just an entry at a time. (If it's broken, they shouldn't expose it...)

And I still don't like what I have here. I like the bullet outline, that's handy, it also always renders on top. I like the glow effect, but I don't like how it's the entire hull, which is what's getting penetrated here, i'd rather just show the surface portion that was penetrated. I might have to see if I can dig into all the vertices and do something, or maybe just give up and play a particle effect.

Anyway, I also fixed my turret turning slightly, i'm casting a ray from the muzzle to the target and setting the rotations on the turret that way, but introduced more bugs with it, silly PzII main gun being off center turret threw off my math. I'll have to do something there, maybe even mild IK. Though I'm tempted to cheat and just move to first person mode. I still need to finish remapping the collision texture I use. I've colored about 1/3 of it, and need to go in and assign armor values for the rest. It's boring work though. I also need to clean up the end of the bullet cam, it leaves things in a messy state, and do something about the timescale I have currently set. Ideally it would do some lerping between start and target. I could just get rid of gravity entirely and do a raycast to see what gets hit, or fire a phantom bullet first at full speed to see what I hit, then use an AnimationCurve to adjust the timescale as the bullet travels.

And Unity Physics never fails to disappoint, it seems to do all sorts of weirdness. Okay, I get not handling a projectile that's travelling at 1000 m/s, but even after lowering that to 250 m/s and lowering the gravity on my shell by the 1/4 as well, in a sort of pseudo time scaling, I still get strange collision behavior. And upping the solver iteration count and lowering the Fixed Timestep doesn't completely alleviate it either, though it does make it better. I've already marked the shell as Continous and tried both Extrapolate and Interpolate.


And then there's the setting to think about. I'm trying to justify WWII tanks and some sort of X-Com or Pirates like gameplay, with the player accepting missions for different factions and controlling a small hodge podge force of two tank platoons, with possibly some support infantry, if I can swing it. (or i could try to toss the WWII trappings)