Currently we can adjust an entity's rotation by positive or negative increments, but we cannot get their current rotation values nor can we set a precise rotation. Both of these are necessary if we want to do things like have an entity face a certain direction or simply know what direction they are facing. This should also apply to the player so we know where he is facing as well. I know we have SetRotateToPlayer, but that currently doesn't work on ordinary entities, plus that is not the only reason we want to get rotations for entities. Having the functionality exposed gives us full control on what we want to do with it.

We can already get an entity's position, but we cannot set it precisely. We are limited to movement forward/back/up/down in increments. Setting the position gives us the ability to teleport things, including the player.

I agree 1000% with tomjscott. The ROTATION could be included in the g_entities table, so we could write things like

Angle1 = g_entities[e]["Rotation"]

We also need a function like

SetAngle(e,Angle)=45

and such.

The reasons for needing these features are the ones so well expressed by tomjscott.

Thn

I wish we had an official board that we can post to, then we can upvote (like reddit) and then the mods can make an OFFICIAL OFFICIAL board that has the listing. What is happening instead is we each are individually (depending on the type of day we had designing) getting frustrated and comming here with those ideas. The problem is one day one person asks for the feature, another day I ask etc. We need to combine our numbers to properly show what we want.

I want this feature because the way it stands I find it REALLY hard to angle things the way I want. I end up flipping it a million times and either settling or giving up cause I cant get it perfect.

agree completely on being able to check the angle, originally i thought the Rotate commands actually set to a specific direction (i.e. RotateY(e, 45) would set the entity to always face right but as it's actually an offset it's very difficult to control where as if it was a set direction we would only need to increase the angle ourselves to create an offset - or have both as standard commands).

getting player (camera) angle is also very much needed


i believe Lee already said he didn't want to give free positioning of entities in one of his blogs but i do think we at least need that control on the Spawn(e) command so we can place new entities anywhere and also the player so we can teleport etc

He did say that. Something about not a good thing for physics. Well, since we can control whether or not an entity has physics applied kind of makes his argument invalid. We need precise placement and rotation of objects as well as getting those values back. Happy to hear that others agree.

How could that not be good for physics? ...unless it works some other way than the mathematical equations... Maybe it's something about adding to the physics system mid-game. If that's the case, there could be a counterpart in init to add it there, and then switch it on as needed.

I think his basic premise was that in a physics system, you really just set it's initial values and then physics is applied and that's how things are affected. Such as having gravity making an object fall or applying velocity/acceleration for forward motion. And that's true up to a point, but we aren't talking about using physics to drive these objects anyway. I just want to make them move any way I please. And it seems to work just fine in other game engines that also have physics.