Lerp and smoothstep
The small helpers for blending one number into another: halfway between two values, turning health into a bar, a soft fade near an edge. They are the building blocks behind nearly every smooth effect in a game.
When you need it
When a value should follow another one softly: a health bar, music getting louder as you get closer, a character turning the short way round, or something gliding towards a target.
Say this to your AI
Use lerp and smoothstep from Spielerando so the music fades in as I walk towards the fire, and the same on fast and slow computers.Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP
Settings
- halfLife (0.1): How many seconds the glide helper takes to cover half of the remaining distance. Smaller feels snappy, bigger feels floaty.
Your AI gets the code
The finished code and math come through the Spielerando connection, so your AI can use them right away. Connect your AI
Common questions
what is lerp in a game
Lerp is short for blending in a straight line. You give it two values and how far along you are, and it hands back the value in between. A quarter of the way from 0 to 100 is 25.
why is my movement faster on a faster computer
Moving a fixed share of the distance every frame runs faster when there are more frames. Use the glide helper in this recipe instead. It looks at the time since the last frame, so it runs the same everywhere.
how do i turn a character the short way round
Do not blend the two angles directly, or the character spins the long way when crossing the back. Blend the shortest turn between them. The angle helper here does exactly that.