Actionable area

[ArrayKnight]

It would be nice if some of the small/skinnier items would have an actionable aura. So the mouse cursor doesn't have to be precisely on the object to interact with it.

[Guest Alan Lawrance]

From a technical POV, the easiest way to do this is enlarge the item collision. However this has unwelcome side effects of making gear placement more difficult (you would have to adjust items downward to lie flat on the ground), and picking the intended item might not work as expected if multiple items are close to each other.

A proper technical solution would be to have a separate collision only used against the raycasting used for pickup, but the usability gain may not be worth the effort involved.

[ArrayKnight]

Would it be possible to leave the items as they are but increase the user interaction area? Instead of having just a point of contact, an area or sphere or something.

[Guest Alan Lawrance]

The only way to increase the user interaction area (and not affect the existing collision) is to add a new collision for the purposes of detecting user interaction. It could be something simple like a sphere, but that breaks for anything that is long/skinny.

Another idea is to not use a raycast, but a spherecast (a ray with thickness) against the gear items -- that would essentially have a similar effect as increasing the gear collision size. It might require some special logic to not just select the first gear item hit, but to collect all hits and choose the "best" one.