When working with projectile weapons in an FPS setup, it’s fairly common to fire toward a distant point along the camera’s forward vector. In most cases this works fine, but it also means we’re ignoring anything that might be blocking the camera’s view. Over time, this can lead to small aiming inconsistencies that are hard to pin down but easy to feel.
A simple improvement is to first resolve a proper aim point from the camera, and then fire the projectile from the weapon’s muzzle toward that point. This keeps the weapon behavior aligned with what the player is actually aiming at.
In my setup, this logic is split into two small functions to keep things clean. The first one, CalculateAimingCoordinates, is responsible for figuring out where the camera is actually aiming in the world.
We trace forward from the camera to see what the crosshair lines up with. If the trace hits something, we use that hit location as the aim target. If nothing is hit, we fall back to a distant point in the same direction. As shown in the screenshot below, this gives us a reliable aim location that accounts for world collision instead of assuming empty space.
That resolved aim location is then passed into the outer function CalculateProjectileLaunchParameters, which handles the weapon-specific side of things.
Here, we calculate the projectile’s launch direction by looking from the muzzle toward the aim point instead of relying directly on camera rotation. Any additional adjustments, such as weapon spread or spawn offsets, are applied at this stage before returning the final launch parameters, as shown below.
With this in place, projectiles always originate correctly from the weapon while still traveling toward whatever the crosshair is pointing at, taking world collision into account. It’s not a large change, but it helps projectile-based weapons feel far more consistent and intentional during gameplay.
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