Unity Aim Assist

Question

i am creating a 3d top down shooter with unity and wanted to create an aim assist for it since hitting enemies is difficult. my idea was to create a trigger that slows down the rotation of the joystick on the weapon when the player aims at an enemy. i implement my rotation as follows:

float eulerY = (Mathf.Atan2(_JoystickShoot.Direction.x, _JoystickShoot.Direction.y) * 180 / Mathf.PI);

However, I don't know how to implement the slowdown now. The player should rotate slower than the actual rotation of the joystick. My approaches have not really been successful so far. does anyone have any idea?

thanks :)

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 21 '22 at 09:20

You can add a variable that scales the rotation. Set it to 1, except when you're pointing at an enemy, where you set it to a value between 0 and 1 that feels good for you.

float eulerY = rotationScaling * (Mathf.Atan2(_JoystickShoot.Direction.x, _JoystickShoot.Direction.y) * 180 / Mathf.PI);

If you want to draw the crosshair towards an enemy, you can calculate the angle (or distance) to the closest enemy. If it is below a certain threshold you can adjust your rotation function to favor rotations towards the enemy over rotations away from it. You can use something like this:

float eulerY = (Mathf.Atan2(_JoystickShoot.Direction.x, _JoystickShoot.Direction.y) * 180 / Mathf.PI);
if (closest enemy is within threshold range)
    if (eulerY * (difference in Y angle to closest enemy) < 0) // if we rotate away from the enemy we scale the rotation down 
        eulerY *= 0.5;
    else // if we rotate towards the enemy we scale it up
        eulerY *= 1.5;

You can adjust this for multiple angles as well, but just doing the same calculation for X and Y direction might feel a bit awkward. The reason is that in that case you have to compare it against the "true" angle/distance, not against the X and Y angles/distances individually.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 21 '22 at 09:21

I think it is more useful to talk about 'direction' rather than 'rotation'.

Presumably your ship travels and/or shoots in the same direction as the joystick is pointing in. This is a natural and intuitive relationship. "slowing down rotation" will most likely break this, making your interface less intuitive to use. There are also usually ways to go directly from a direction-vector to a rotation, for example Quaternion.LookRotation, avoiding the need to deal angles directly.

You could instead check if there is any enemy within a small arc, select the enemy closest to the center of the arc, and use the direction towards that enemy to fire in. Note that this can fail if enemies are moving and shots are slow, since it can prevent 'leading' your shots.

Other alternatives could be to simply make your enemies easier to hit. Make the enemies or shots larger, or possibly, just make the hitboxes larger. Or increase fire-rate and/or dispersion.

Unity Aim Assist

2 Answers2