Scripting getBlockFromViewDirection is inaccurate

One theory about this is that the raycast uses the center of the head as its origin, which works great for most entities. However, since the first-person view of the player is slightly above the center of the head, the raycast is further down than it should be.

I could confirm in Android.

Hi there,

I reviewed your code and the behaviour you described. After looking closely, the code is working as intended and the API is behaving correctly.

In your script, after getting the block and face from player.getBlockFromViewDirection(), you use a switch statement to offset the block variable to an adjacent block based on the face that was hit (for example, block.below(), block.above(), etc.). As a result, the particles are spawned on the block adjacent to the face you are looking at, not directly on the face itself.

If you want the particles to appear on the actual face you are looking at, you should use hit.block directly, without offsetting it in the switch statement.

So, the observed behaviour is due to the code logic, not a bug in the API. The API is returning the correct block and face information.

Hope this helps clarify things!

This code will spawn your particle array around the actual block you are looking at:

system.runInterval(() => {
    for (let player of world.getAllPlayers()) {
        let hit = player.getBlockFromViewDirection({ maxDistance: 20 })
        if (hit !== undefined) {
            let block = hit.block //Initialise block with the hit block to verify accuracy of the raycast
            // The switch statement will offset the particles according to what face the raycast hits
            // The parameter in each block.method will determine how many blocks the particle array is offset by
            // Uncomment switch statement to offset the particle array
            // switch (hit.face) {
            //     case Direction.Down: {
            //         block = hit.block.below(1)
            //         break
            //     }
            //     case Direction.Up: {
            //         block = hit.block.above(1)
            //         break
            //     }
            //     case Direction.East: {
            //         block = hit.block.east(1)
            //         break
            //     }
            //     case Direction.West: {
            //         block = hit.block.west(1)
            //         break
            //     }
            //     case Direction.North: {
            //         block = hit.block.north(1)
            //         break
            //     }
            //     case Direction.South: {
            //         block = hit.block.south(1)
            //         break
            //     }
            // }
            let dimension = player.dimension
            let pos = block.location
            for (let x = 0; x <= 1; x += 0.5) {
                for (let y = 0; y <= 1; y += 0.5) {
                    for (let z = 0; z <= 1; z += 0.5) {
                        dimension.spawnParticle("minecraft:redstone_ore_dust_particle", {
                            x: pos.x + x,
                            y: pos.y + y,
                            z: pos.z + z,
                        })
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}, 1)

If you wish to have the particle array spawn above the block you are looking at every time, use const block = hit.block.above(1)instead of the entire switch statement