How to check whether an angle lies within a specific negative to positive range?

Question

I'm trying to develop a script that detects if an object's angles are tilting too much.

I am new to Unity, and I am sure this is not the best way to test an object's angles, but I am trying to learn C# so I'd rather figure that out myself.

All I want to know is how to check whether a value is between -101 and 101.

I have tried this so many different ways, and even though it is working fine for positive integers, the if statement is not applying the moment that my z angle becomes negative.

Here is what I have tried so far:

(maxangle = 101, minangle = -101)

if(Player.transform.rotation.eulerAngles.z > Mathf.Sign(-101) && 
Player.transform.rotation.eulerAngles.z < maxangle),

if(Player.transform.rotation.eulerAngles.z > minangle && 
Player.transform.rotation.eulerAngles.z < maxangle)

Answer 1

Doing math on Euler angles can get you into trouble.

Under the hood, Unity uses quaternions to have simpler & more uniform rotational behaviour. It converts to Euler angles when it needs to display them in the inspector, but this conversion isn't unique. For instance, a z rotation of -5° is equivalent to a z rotation of +355°, and the engine might decide to give you the latter.

You can work around some common angular wraparound issues with the DeltaAngle method:

// This will wrap angles close to 360 around
// to the corresponding negatives instead
float difference = Mathf.DeltaAngle(0, transform.eulerAngles.z);

if(difference > minAngle && difference < maxAngle) {
    ...
}

This will behave well for rotations within a particular range, but the mapping from orientations to Euler angles has discontinuities, so you can get surprises if your object can take on any arbitrary orientation.

If what you want is to evaluate how much your object is leaning, comparing dot products of its local up or forward vectors can give you a more continuous and consistent measure, without the surprises of the arbitrary Euler angle mapping.