There are a couple old projects I recently realized aren’t visible anymore (because they were using old player technologies) so I decided to dust them off and do WebGL builds of them. I’ll talk about the other next month, but in this blog post I just want to focus on one, the demo of an algorithm I devised for aiming at a moving target. The interactive demo is on my space at itch.io:
Decades ago I had programmed this as a little cheat/mod for an open-source Missile Command style game, years later implemented it in AS3 to make a Flash demo, and just now decided to port it to C# for use in Unity.
Unlike how other people generally approach this problem, I did it as a recursive feedback loop. There’s a rough estimate that gets calculated, then that result is fed back into the next iteration of the calculation, resulting in a slightly more accurate estimate, and repeat a few times until the estimate is within a pixel of accuracy. Here’s the demo on github if you want to inspect the code.
On a QA page where I discuss the algorithm (plus link to the original Flash demo) a commenter there pointed out a big advantage of my approach (versus how other people were doing it): even if there is no exact solution, the shooter will still fire roughly at the target.
