How to make an object rotate towards the mouse position.

[PenguinKing]

Summary:
Essentially, I've looked up several different ways to look this up and I get the gist of what's going on with the math.atan2 and various other ways of getting the angle to face towards the mouse position. Though; I'm still having a bit of trouble with trying to get the object to face completely towards the mouse and not spin all over the place like it's currently doing right now.

Problem:
The object that I'm trying to get to rotate towards the mouse position spins around rapidly whenever I move the mouse (even a miniscule amount makes it spin out of control.) As you can see in the gif here, I'm using degrees instead of radians with the math.deg() method, however; even that doesn't prevent the spinning for some reason.

Attempted Fixes:

• Reversing math.atan2 parameters
• Attempted to make the first parameter of math.atan2 negative.

  Code: Select all

  local y = -(self.y -(love.mouse.getY()/5))

  - ohai

Files:
TowerDefense Files

[ohai]

I have not looked at your code, but this works for me:

Code: Select all

local dx = game.mouseX - x
local dy = -(game.mouseY - y)
love.graphics.draw(image, x, y, math.atan2(dx, dy), 1, 1, image:getWidth() / 2, image:getHeight() / 2)

[PenguinKing]

I have not looked at your code, but this works for me:

Code: Select all

local dx = game.mouseX - x
local dy = -(game.mouseY - y)
love.graphics.draw(image, x, y, math.atan2(dx, dy), 1, 1, image:getWidth() / 2, image:getHeight() / 2)

I tried your suggestion and it didn't seem to do anything at all. Thanks for trying though!

[ohai]

I've looked at your code now and I think your problem is in turret.lua:18.
You are needlessly converting radians to degrees.
The draw function takes radians in the rotation parameter.

number r (0)
Orientation (radians).

[PenguinKing]

I've looked at your code now and I think your problem is in turret.lua:18.
You are needlessly converting radians to degrees.
The draw function takes radians in the rotation parameter.

number r (0)
Orientation (radians).

Works perfectly! Thanks for the help! Now that that's done I need to get the orientation of the sprite correct when it turns to face the mouse, but I can do that on my own. Thanks for the help, once again! Have a good day.

[ohai]

Works perfectly! Thanks for the help! Now that that's done I need to get the orientation of the sprite correct when it turns to face the mouse, but I can do that on my own. Thanks for the help, once again! Have a good day.

No problem!
In the meantime I actually downloaded your project, and this works perfectly:

Code: Select all

function Turret:update(dt)
    local x = (love.mouse.getX()/5) - self.x
    local y = -((love.mouse.getY()/5) - self.y)
    self.angle = math.atan2(x, y)
end

function Turret:draw()
    [...]
    love.graphics.draw(self.image, self.x, self.y, self.angle, 1, 1, self.width/2, self.height/2)
    [...]
end

Have a nice day too!