Beginner - need help with SmoothDamp

Hello. I'm a very fresh newbie with Unity and i'm trying to do simple stuff : I have a cube (figuring a car), that is set on a ground with 5 rows. I want that when I press "Q", it moves to the row to its left, and I want it not to be instantaneous but smooth. Si I'm trying out to use Smoothdamp but when I hit Q, the command makes it jump instead of moving on to the X axis. Here is the code. Can you guys tell me what I am missing ? Thanks a lot !

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3.  
4. public class RowPlayerMovement : MonoBehaviour {
5.  
6.     public Rigidbody rb;
7.     private bool left = false;
8.     public float smoothTime = 0.3f;
9.     public Vector3 velocity;
10.    
11.  
12.     void Start() {
13.         velocity = Vector3.zero;
14.     }
15.     void Update() {
16.          if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Q)) {
17.             left = true;
18.          }
19.      }
20.  
21.     void FixedUpdate() {
22.         if (left == true) {
23.             MovePlayerLeft();
24.         }
25.     }
26.     void MovePlayerLeft() {
27.         rb.MovePosition(transform.position + Vector3.SmoothDamp(transform.position, Vector3.left, ref velocity, 0.3f));
28.         // OR
29.         // transform.Translate(Vector3.SmoothDamp(transform.position, Vector3.left, ref velocity, smoothTime));
30.         Debug.Log("going left");
31.         left = false;
32.     }
33. }
34. //

 

You want two variables:

-

currentLane

-

desiredLane

When you process user input, you set

desiredLane

to what it should be.

Every

Update()

you use

Mathf.MoveTowards()

(or

Vector.MoveTowards()

) to move

currentLane

gradually to

desiredLane

.

 

Thanks for the answer. However as I said, I am very newbie, and I tried to play with these functions with no result. My cube doesn't even move. Could be a more explicit please ? It's not easy getting started

 

Up. I'm really stuck with this one. Tried a new thing, works fines when I have only 3 lanes, can't manage to make it work properly with 5. I'm probably missing something very very simple here... here is the new code.

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3.  
4. public class LaneMovement : MonoBehaviour {
5.     private int desiredLane = 2;
6.     private int currentLane = 2;
7.     public Rigidbody rb;
8.     public float speed = 5f;
9.     private float laneDistance = 2f;
10.  
11.     private void Update() {
12.         //gathering inputs
13.         if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Q)) {
14.             MoveLane(false);
15.         }
16.         if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.D)) {
17.             MoveLane(true);
18.         }
19.         //calculate where we should be in the future
20.         Vector3 targetPosition = transform.position.z * Vector3.forward;
21.         if (desiredLane < currentLane) {
22.             targetPosition += Vector3.left * laneDistance;
23.         }
24.         else if (desiredLane > currentLane) {
25.             targetPosition += Vector3.right * laneDistance;
26.         }
27.         // calculate move delta
28.         Vector3 moveVector = Vector3.zero;
29.         moveVector.x = (targetPosition - transform.position).normalized.x * speed;
30.         moveVector.y = 0f;
31.         moveVector.z = speed;
32.  
33.         //move the Cube
34.         rb.MovePosition(transform.position + moveVector * Time.deltaTime);
35.     }
36.  
37.     private void MoveLane(bool goingRight) {
38.  
39.         desiredLane += goingRight ? 1 : -1;
40.         desiredLane = Mathf.Clamp(desiredLane, 0, 4);
41.     }
42. }

Problem is that it won't move to the 0 and 4th lane. I'm guessing it is because I have the change the currentLane value somehow, but I don't know where and how to do it. If I add "currentLane--;"' at lane 23 it doesn't move at all. I don't really get it...

 

The problem is the choice of integer values for lanes. They can only either be lane 0, 1 or 2. They can't be in between round numbers. It needs to be a floating point value so that it can be between lanes.

This type of question comes up so universally I have finally just made a sample package to demonstrate the basic concept. Read my first post above and see if you can correlate each part of the code to the steps indicated.

Code located here: https://gist.github.com/kurtdekker/fb3c33ec6911a1d9bfcb23e9f62adac4

 

As a solution I've used this one

Code (CSharp):

1.     void MovementProcess()
2.     {
3.         if (rotatingOn)
4.         {
5.             var step = rotateSpeed * Time.deltaTime;
6.             transform.rotation = Quaternion.RotateTowards(transform.rotation, target.rotation, step);
7.         }
8.     }