At the end I had to give up on calculating my squircle by hand.
Two reasons
- Unity gives an automatic way to approach the problem;
- The tool Unity gives works with any (some kinds of any) type of shape, not only with geometrically correct squircles
I ended up using ray casting. I feel like I cheated, but.. that’s life. On one hand, I don’t have the nerve to develop the maths to deal with the problem myself, so… see reason 1. On the other hand, I have the consolation of working with shapes even better than a squircle.
Here’s how it goes:
You have a player somewhere on the map and a list of objects you want to track on your compass.
On the minimap you see the player himself. He always keeps his Noth-bound position, so when you rotate, you see the map rotating around you. Each trackable object (if not close to be seen on the minimap itself) is represented as an icon on the border of the minimap. The border is the ‘compass’.
You get the angle between the player forward position and the object in real world, then create an icon on the compass and place it on the compass, keeping the same angle between the up position of the canvas and the icon. The problem is the distance between the icon and the center of the minimap.
Here’s what you do – you have a secret object, outside of the playing area, that is basically a 3d version of the shape of your compass. That’s your ‘wall’. It’s hollow. In the middle there’s a radar object with a small script. You give that script the angle ‘in the real world’ between the player.forward and the object. The radar fires a ray at that angle and returns the distance to the wall at that angle.
You get that distance, scale it accordingly and give it to the compass.
If feels clunky to have a real world object that scans constantly to get the distance, but it undoubtedly works and it works with almost any shape, at that. The only limitation for the form of your compass and minimap is that the border can not swerve to an extend that one part of it blocks line of view from the center to another part.
Here’s the physical object with the (invisible) radar in the middle.
The radar is currently tracking 6 objects from the map, using angles, provided by the map itself. The visible rays are Debug.DrawRay().
Here are the map and the radar complex, set aside it:
You can clearly see that I haven’t even bothered to set the anchor points of the objects to the centers of their bases. I am tracking their basic 0,0 vertices here. Irrelevant.
Here are both the scene view and the play view:
All colored objects are on the compass. The compass itself is the blue band around the minimap.
This was just a feature-dev scene, so I didn’t bother matching colors of objects to icons. Black icons are blue objects. Yellow is yellow.
So… this has not yet been transferred to the main scene. In the full version you have multiple type of objects that you can see on the compass, some only from a certain distance. All of them should disappear from the compass if there are actually seen in the minimap (here you can see the yellow object bot on the map and the compass).
This step of transferring the compass success to a ‘main scene’ type of actual structure will be hell…
Uuhh!! Look what I found ShareX can do!
Screen recording! And – Tadaaaa! – Screen recording to GIF!
