Use Raycast object instead of custom vector calculations

[ClobberXD]

This would result in cleaner code and possibly more efficiency.

Also prepares the mod for 5.0.0

[stujones11]

This is something I plan to look into for MT 5.0.0 but I doubt that it will be much, if any more efficient. The Lua raycasting method I use is really quite efficient as dot products are not computationally expensive. It also saves a lot of the Lua to C++ communication which itself carries significant overhead.

However, the in-built raycasting will be a lot more accurate than my current method so if the performance is not made worse by any noticeable amount then I will likely switch to using that.

For now the raycasting is partly broken in 0.4.16-stable and I'm not sure whether the fix was back-ported to 0.4.17.x

[ClobberXD]

Here are a couple of important reasons to switch to Raycast:

• There's a recent improvement to Raycast which exports the exact point of contact with the object / node. This allows for detecting head-shots, which is an important part of a guns mod, IMO.
• I, like many others, have a bunch of potential improvements in mind, but it's extremely difficult to figure out how this mod works. Switching to Raycast will make the code much more understandable, and would encourage potential contributors to.... contribute :)

[stujones11]

I have decided to go with minetest.raycast since it does simplify the code significantly. It also much improves the mob-mod compatibility. My guess is there should be a slight increase in performance with PVE, though there may be a very slight decrease for pure PVP mode (no entity or node detection) however, I hope this should be compensated by the other optimisations I have made.

https://github.com/stujones11/shooter/tree/0.6.0-dev

[ClobberXD]

Great to know, thanks! :)

[stujones11]

No problem, this can be closed now since this part is now completed in the development version.