3D Math

Clip the object against the view frustrum, then you know whether it is in fron of you or not.

Or just shoot a ray out in the direction of the camera and "use" the object that the ray hits first.

- WitchLord

I like the idea of shooting a ray, but how ? i am not familiar with that concept, if you could help, would appreciate it much. Right now i have implemented a routine, to search thru the "Actionable" objects, and find the one that is closest, and if it is within a certain distance, i act on it. Does this sound reasonable ?

thanks much

Code makes the world go round...

If you are not interested in accuracy, which is reasonable for most games, what you are doing should be just fine. You just need to add a test to make sure the object is actually in front of the camera/player. It would be really confusing if when trying to use an object in front of you, you instead open the door behind you just because it was closer.

The idea of the ray is that you draw a line from the camera''s position in the direction it is looking. And then you go through each object to see if they intersect the line. The object that intersects the line closest to the camera is the one that is hit first by the ray. Of course, objects that are too far away don''t need to do any intersection test. With this way you get an exact object picking method, so that the object that is under the player''s reticle is the one that is used. It does require a lot more coding though, so if you don''t need it I would stick with what you''ve already got.

- WitchLord