Weapon

The Weapon component is usually the main entry-point for interacting with the ballistics simulation.

It is mainly just a convenience component, that allows you to combine a Bullet Info, Visual Bullet Provider, and spawn point transform, so you only have to call Weapon.Shoot() to fire a bullet.

Visual vs. Bullet Spawn Point

The Weapon component exposes two spawn point transforms, the Bullet Spawn Point and Visual Spawn Point.

• Bullet Spawn Point is the position used for the internal ballistics simulation and collision detection (z-axis of the transform pointing forward)
• Visual Spawn Point provides the initial position for the Visual Bullet (if present)

This distinction is often useful for first person shooter games, because the hit detection should usually originate from the center of the camera, while the visual bullet representation should appear to originate at the end of the weapon's barrel.

This obviously causes a discrepancy between the visual bullet and the internal hit detection. To mitigate this offset, Bullet Ballistics automatically moves the visual bullet position towards the internal bullet position over a given distance set in the BallisticSettings Visual To Physical Distance.

Manually Queuing Bullets

Internally, Weapon.Shoot() calls Ballistics.Core.AddBullet() with a new BulletInstance.

public readonly struct BulletInstance
{
    public readonly Weapon Weapon;
    public readonly Vector3 Position;
    public readonly Vector3 Direction;
    public readonly BulletInfo Info;
    public readonly IVisualBullet Projectile;
}

You can also manually add bullets to the ballistics simulation using Ballistics.Core.AddBullet() at any point. Note however, that AddBullet() just queues bullets for processing, so the ballistics calculations can be batched together with all other active bullets.

Queued bullet instances are added to the simulation just after the main Update() loop. So all bullets queued after Update() (e.g. LateUpdate()) will not be processed until the next frame.