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The Amount of One Vector's Magnitude that Lies in Another
Vector's Direction

The Amount of One

Vectors Magnitude that
Lies in Another Vectors
Direction
A cars speedometer typically works by measuring the rotational speed
of the wheels. The car may not be moving directly forward (it may be
skidding sideways, for example) in which case part of the motion will not
be in the direction the speedometer can measure. The magnitude of an
objects rigidbody.velocity vector will give the speed in its direction of
overall motion but to isolate the speed in the forward direction, you
should use the dot product:-

var fwdSpeed = Vector3.Dot(rigidbody.velocity, transform.forward);

Naturally, the direction can be anything you like but the direction vector
must always be normalized for this calculation. Not only is the result
more correct than the magnitude of the velocity, it also avoids the slow
square root operation involved in finding the magnitude.

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