How to Fix Lock-On Targeting Selecting the Wrong Target

Wrong lock-on targets come from naive selection scoring. Weighting it well fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Score by angle and distance

Prefer the target closest to the screen center or the player's aim direction, balanced with distance, rather than just the nearest. The player expects to lock what they are looking at, not necessarily the closest.

2. Exclude obscured targets

Check line of sight and range so the lock-on does not pick an enemy behind a wall or out of reach. Selecting a target the player cannot see or hit feels broken.

3. Handle target switching

Let the player cycle targets and re-evaluate when the locked target dies or leaves range. A lock that sticks to a dead or fled target, or cannot switch, frustrates as much as picking wrong initially.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.