Making object move in an angle

Question

I have a game with a beat-em-up perspective (think Final Fight, Streets of Rage) where movement is in X and Z. My movement logic consists of checking controller input of X-axis for X movement and Y-axis for Z movement. I use this logic to move enemy as well, using this method:

internal bool MoveTowardsPosition(Vector3 targetPosition)
{
    bool reachedPosition = false;
    bool reachedX = false;
    bool reachedZ = false;

    // Determine x direction
    if (Mathf.Round(Mathf.Abs(targetPosition.x - _enemy.transform.position.x)) > 0)
    {
        if (targetPosition.x < _enemy.transform.position.x)
            Input.HorizontalMove = -1;
        else
            Input.HorizontalMove = 1;
    }
    else
        reachedX = true;

    // Determine z direction
    if (Mathf.Round(Mathf.Abs(targetPosition.z - _enemy.transform.position.z)) > 0)
    {
        if (targetPosition.z < _enemy.transform.position.z)
            Input.DepthMove = -1;
        else
            Input.DepthMove = 1;
    }
    else
        reachedZ = true;

    if (reachedX && reachedZ)
        reachedPosition = true;

    return reachedPosition;
}

So what happens here is that given a target position, I add to the HorizontalMove (X) and DepthMove (Z) until the enemy reaches the destination (these X and Z additions will be read on Update to do a transform.translate()). The enemy does move to the destination but in a unnatural path. So when Z is larger, it will reach the destination X first then traverse Z. So for example, X=2 and Z=5, it'll traverse with a path like this:

What I'm trying to do is for it to traverse a path like this:

I figured instead of adding fixed 1/-1, I need to determine X and Z based on that angle but I'm lost on how to compute/do it. Can you guys lend me a hand, please?

Answer 1

I think you'll want to pass a normalized vector into the movement function. Something that will combine the x and z movements into a single variable. Likely you'll need to use the Pythagorean theorem as well. This video may have what you are looking for:

https://youtu.be/m7VY1T6f8Ak