LÖVE

I have been working on a little project and ran into a bit of a technical snag; I was wondering if someone else has done something similar and can lend a hand.

The basic concept involves setting up a turret, or a number of automated turrets, the turrets will automatically locate the closest target and open fire, then move onto the next closest turret. At this stage I haven't even thought about not shooting at something behind a wall...

These are the fragments that I have cobbled together thus far;

These two will return the distance or angle between two known points by inputting the x/y coordinates of both;
I have been able to use the above distance function, in conjunction with the below code to write to the screen the distances between the two turrets and two enemies (the full code is in the game.lua attachment, put the three functions into the function.love.draw() section of main.lua and it should be about the same as what I see).
With the addition of some sort of identifier I could maybe use the turretdist function to find the closest enemy and begin shooting it, by shooting a projectile at angle that I could find using the above angle() function...

I haven't really got any programming experience so any help is really appreciated; am I going about this the right way? Or am I completely mad...

Sounds like you're on the right path.
Depending on the complexity of your gameplay you may want to look into state machines or other AI techniques. There's a book called "Programming Game AI by Example" by Buckland - and although the examples are in C++, I strongly recommend looking into it.
A while ago I wrote a short a tutorial on vector math that you might possibly find useful (see "Rotating to target").

At this stage I haven't even thought about not shooting at something behind a wall..

This is usually checked using a technique called "raycasting"

This may sound trivial, but you are actually talking about two different problems here: The first is to find the nearest enemy and the other one is to shoot a bullet in that direction.

Your solution for the nearest neighbor search is a correct one: For every turret, seek through every enemy to determine the closest one. Depending on how many turrets and enemies you have, this may become very slow, but don't bother about that just yet.

For the second problem, there are (at least) two solutions: The trigonometric and the linear algebra one. You chose the the trigonometric one and that will work just fine, but I find it often more easy to think in order of directions and magnitues (i.e. vectors) to solve those problems.

You can get the direction and distance you have to move a turret at position (t.x, t.y) to an enemy at (e.x, e.y) by substracting the turret position from the enemy position:
\[ \mathbf{d} = \left(\begin{array}{c}d.x\\ d.y\end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c}e.x\\ e.y\end{array}\right) - \left(\begin{array}{c}t.x\\ t.y\end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c}e.x - t.x\\ e.y - t.y\end{array}\right)\]
To get just the direction in which you have to move the turret (or rather: shoot the bullet), you have to divide (normalize) the vector d by it's magnitude ||d||:
\[\mathbf{n} = \frac{\mathbf{d}}{\|\mathbf{d}\|} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{(d.x^2 + d.y^2)}} \left(\begin{array}{c}d.x\\ d.y\end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c}\frac{d.x}{\sqrt{(d.x^2 + d.y^2)}}\\ \frac{d.y}{\sqrt{(d.x^2 + d.y^2)}}\end{array}\right)\]

Now if the bullet will move 100px per second, you can use the vector n to calculate it's new position in each update step: I hope that wasn't too confusing

Or just move the turret like :
(ANGLE is the angle from turret to closest target)

turret.x = turret.x+math.cos(ANGLE)*speed*dt
turret.y = turret.y+math.sin(ANGLE)*speed*dt

vrld wrote:This may sound trivial, but you are actually talking about two different problems here: The first is to find the nearest enemy and the other one is to shoot a bullet in that direction.

Your solution for the nearest neighbor search is a correct one: For every turret, seek through every enemy to determine the closest one. Depending on how many turrets and enemies you have, this may become very slow, but don't bother about that just yet.

For the second problem, there are (at least) two solutions: The trigonometric and the linear algebra one. You chose the the trigonometric one and that will work just fine, but I find it often more easy to think in order of directions and magnitues (i.e. vectors) to solve those problems.

You can get the direction and distance you have to move a turret at position (t.x, t.y) to an enemy at (e.x, e.y) by substracting the turret position from the enemy position:
\[ \mathbf{d} = \left(\begin{array}{c}d.x\\ d.y\end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c}e.x\\ e.y\end{array}\right) - \left(\begin{array}{c}t.x\\ t.y\end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c}e.x - t.x\\ e.y - t.y\end{array}\right)\]
To get just the direction in which you have to move the turret (or rather: shoot the bullet), you have to divide (normalize) the vector d by it's magnitude ||d||:
\[\mathbf{n} = \frac{\mathbf{d}}{\|\mathbf{d}\|} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{(d.x^2 + d.y^2)}} \left(\begin{array}{c}d.x\\ d.y\end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c}\frac{d.x}{\sqrt{(d.x^2 + d.y^2)}}\\ \frac{d.y}{\sqrt{(d.x^2 + d.y^2)}}\end{array}\right)\]

Now if the bullet will move 100px per second, you can use the vector n to calculate it's new position in each update step:

Code: Select all

function love.update(dt)
    (...)
    bullet.x = bullet.x + bullet.n.x * 100 * dt
    bullet.y = bullet.y + bullet.n.y * 100 * dt
end

I hope that wasn't too confusing

Holy crap, math formatting <3333

T-Bone wrote:Holy crap, math formatting <3333

LaTeX.

vrld wrote: I hope that wasn't too confusing

It has been a mighty long time since I have had to think about vectors, but it makes sense. The more I think about it the more sense it makes.

Would I be correct in assuming that bullet.n.x would be a positive value when moving... to the right, and negative when moving to the left?

There is a lot to think though, thank you everyone for your replies.