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Basic Setup

What is an Interaction?

When you look at an object or hover your mouse over an object, certain things can happen. You could interact with a door to open it, click on a keypad button to enter the number, or interact with a lever to pull it.

With the default controls, an interaction occurs when you're looking at an Interactable and click the left mouse button.

Setup

1. Interaction Controller

In order to interact with objects in the world, you need to have an InteractionController in the scene, as a child of the ExplorationToolkitManager object.

By default, the ExplorationToolkitManager prefab has this controller included, so there's no need to add it manually.

Looking in the Inspector, there are a few things we can go over to better understand this component.

  • The Interact Method defines what types of interactions are supported. Check out the section below for more info.
  • World Range is the max distance from the camera a World interaction can occur.
  • Cursor Range is the max distance from the cursor's world position a Cursor interaction can occur.
  • Checks Per Second defines the rate at which raycasts will be emitted to detect interactables. You may want to limit this if you're experiencing performance issues, but overall the system is well optimized.
  • If you are implementing the Inspect system, assign your inspect camera here, or click Find in scene to automatically reference the inspect camera.

2. Interactables

Now that we have the interaction controller, we need actual objects to interact with. If you want the player to be able to interact with something, simply attach the Interactable component, and a collider to define the interaction bounds.

  • If you are using the Crosshair system, you can set a Crosshair to display when hovering over this Interactable. That could be a door icon when looking at a door, or an open hand when looking at an item to pickup.
  • Has Cooldown allows you to limit the rate at which it can be interacted with.
  • As of now, Prompt Text does nothing. This system will be implemented in the future.

Interact Methods

On the Interactable component, you may notice there's an Interact Method property. There are 3 types of interactions that can occur and you can filter Interactable components to detect all or one of them.

Method How it Detects
World When you aim the center of the camera at something. E.g. opening a door, picking up an item.
Cursor When you hover the mouse cursor over something. E.g. clicking buttons in a keypad when the camera is zoomed into it.
Both Checks for both World and Cursor interactions

For example, let's say you have a puzzle box. You might have an Interactable (with the World method) on the box for the player to look at and interact to open the inspect screen. With the mouse now enabled, you might have smaller interactables (with the Cursor method) for the player to click on.