How to make a Phaser?

[jellytot]

Hi All.

Need some help. I want to make a Star-Trek syle phaser in my spaceship game, with little ships on screen. When I hold down on the mouse button, I want to:
A: Target the closest enemy ship
B: While holding the mouse button down, shoot a phaser (straight line laser) at the targeted ship. When I release the button, the phaser stops.
Can anyone tell me how to do these 2 items?
Thanks
JT

[stuckboy]

Well for the first one you'd need to fastloop through all the ships that are within phaser range and find the closest ship you could use advanced direction object.

For the phaser itself you could either use the overlay redux or you could stretch an active object between the phaser gun and the point of impact.

If you don't know what I'm talking about you should probably spend a little time experimenting with fastloops and the advanced direction object. Also look at any related examples that are posted on the file archive.

[Nifflas]

Stuckboys solution is the best, although I don't like using an extension for something that you only need 2 events for (finding out the angle).

Perhaps my distance and angle example can be helpful?

[DavidN]

It's the matter of selecting the nearest one out of the group that the extension helps with, really. I actually wonder if it's more efficient doing the fastloop to find the nearest then calculating the angle, or relying on ADO to do it.