I've been having difficulty implementing enemies with a billboarding system for a while:
For a new project I'm reusing some animated sprites from an old static camera shooter game I made. It consisted of shooting projectiles and hitting enemies advancing towards your position. The enemies were capsules which had an animated plane in front of them.
I wanted to go a step further and make a raycast system that would detect if the impact on a plane is on the alpha part of its texture. I achieved it using a SpriteRenderer and a plane that matched the size of the sprite which receives the impact of the Raycast.
The problem comes with the movement of the enemies. If I use Rigidbodies this conflicts with the plane which detects the impact, since I have to use a non-convex Mesh Collider for RaycastHit.textureCoord (With Convex colliders it doesn't return the correct position). I need Rigidbody based movement for the enemies to push each other when colliding.
I tried using Transform Movement, since the error does not occur, but this allows enemies to pass through each other and occupy the same space. I started investigating navMesh but I'm not sure if it is possible to avoid collisions. I started to place a group of trigger colliders on the enemy mimicking the shape of the sprite. But this makes it difficult for me to detect collisions when enemies do certain animations (Some enemies jump diagonally or their animations are a bit jittery). I would like to keep the impact detection system for the sprite, but maybe there is another way to check the texture at the impact location.
I think my options are:
- With rigidbody based movement: separate the animation and hit detection system from the enemy movement. And make the billboarding effect teleport to the object constantly.
- With Transform movement: Detect if they are overlapping and move them in opposite direction to the overlapping to simulate the collision.
- With motion based navMesh: I'm not sure if it will be useful to me, since the characters jump and I also believe that a Mesh Agent ship cannot simultaneously be an obstacle. I understand that the navMesh cannot be generated in runtime.
- Leaving texture based detection and using the trigger colliders group: Animate the colliders to also follow the animations. Or simplify everything to a large collider, losing precision on impact. -Find an alternative method to detect the impact coordinates in the texture, avoiding using RaycastHit.textureCoord and therefore Mesh Collider. (Although I would like to keep the impact detection system as it is, maybe there is a similar approach for the same result).
The reason I have not yet delved into these solutions is because I would like to keep the system simple. I'm trying to avoid separating the enemy into 2 gameobjects, simulating collisions or animating collider positions. I honestly don't know which way to go in order to move forward with the project.
