Have a simple enemy detecting he touch a wall to make him stop/turn around

Question

I am doing a very simple scene with a cube sliding on the "ground". Once the cube reach a wall, he is blocked.

I want to detect the wall to make the cube go in the other direction. I used OnCollisionEnter but it is triggered at the scene start as my cube touch the ground.

I could make a difference between grounds and wall, but my game will make the whole scene rotate, and floor will become wall and wall floor.

I wanted to add "physics whatever object" to allow a left/right detection but i cannot add collider or rigidbody to my cube.

How can i have a cube knowing when he touch a wall without having a false positive with the ground ?

Answer 1

I could make a difference between grounds and wall, but my game will make the whole scene rotate, and floor will become wall and wall floor.

Why couldn't you just tag the two sets of walls (horizontal and vertical), and then do tag check in OnCollisionEnter for horizontal or vertical as a wall check compared to the rotation of the world? So, for example, if the world is rotated by 90 degrees, you "hit a wall" when you collide with something that was marked as horizontal.

Answer 2

Look at the contact normals, ContactPoint.normal. These are vectors perpendicular to the contact surfaces, so if you hit a wall the normal will be mostly horizontal and if you hit the floor the normal will be mostly vertical (unless the geometry of your walls and floors is especially gnarly).

A collision may have multiple contact points (Collision.contacts); averaging/summing their normals would probably work well.

You might also try comparing the average of the points of contact (ContactPoint.point) with the center position of your cube. That might well be more robust.

(I haven't tried actually doing this in Unity.)

Answer 3

Instead of using 'just' a cube, you could use a prefab with a cube, and add some empty gameObjects with triggers or colliders to check collsions on different positions.

Answer 4

It's likely you're always going to get a collision with the floor; if you're using gravity, your cube is essentially going to be almost constantly hitting the floor in addition to any other objects it hits. The trick is in determining if there are additional collisions that involve a wall.

Without knowing much about your specific implementation, here's what I'd suggest: In OnCollisionEnter, check every ContactPoint's normal to see if it's perpendicular to the floor. For now, I'll assume that your cube rotates to have its Forward vector parallel to the ground on which it's moving (resulting in its Up vector pointing away from the ground). If that's wrong, let me know how you have it set up and I'll try to edit the answer to fit. My code is in C#, if you're using JavaScript, there will obviously be some differences. In your cube's collision code, you'll want something like this:

void OnCollisionEnter(Collision other) {
    bool hitWall = false;
    foreach(ContactPoint cp in other.contacts) {
        float dot = Vector3.Dot(cp.normal, transform.up);
        if(dot < 1.0f && dot > -1.0f) {
            hitWall = true;
            break;  //No need to keep checking once you've found a wall
        }
    }

    if(hitWall) {
        //At least one collision was not with the floor (or ceiling)
        //Handle wall collisions here
    }
}

If you still get false positives, consider using a numbers closer to zero than 1.0 and -1.0 (like 0.9 and -0.9) for a little less precision in determining a collision with a non-wall.