First of all the game is quite nice, but there's a simple method with which you can win every level pretty fast, which kind of kills the fun as it is now.
How can I tell whether the circular sprit intersects with an arbitrary line.
I don't know how familiar you are with linear algebra, it really helps ;-)
(Update: When I talk about "points", I really mean "position vectors to points". Thanks FunkyMonk)
I'll call the end points of your line A and B, the center of your sprite M, the point on the line which is the closest to M is called C (all those are vectors), the radius of the sprite is r (a scalar value).
Since C is on the line between A and B, it must be expressible in the form A + x * (B-A). Since it's the closest point to M, the connection line from C to M is perpendicular to the original line, or as a formula:
(B-A) . (M-C) = 0
or
(B-A) . (M - A - x * (B-A)) = 0
# (that's a scalar product)
The only unknown part in this equation is x, which you can calculate from that equation, but to which I'm too tired at the moment.
If 0 <= x <= 1 and |M - C| < r, then it circle touches or intersects the line.
Likewise if |M-A| <= r or |M-B| <= r it also touches or intersects. In all other case it doesn't.
To get a realistic bouncing behaviour, the angle between (dx, dy) and (M-C) after the bounce has to be negative of what it was before the bounce. | [reply]
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There's a fair amount of arithmetic to do to get the final result.
You might save cycles by doing an initial check whether the bounding box around the ball intersects the bounding box around the line -- depending on the length of the line and its angle.
The other approach may be to avoid performing a calculation on every (dx, dy) step. In particular, if the ball is moving in a straight line (or any other path that you have a polynomial for), you can calculate where the centre will be if it meets the line, then after each step you can check if the centre has gone past that point (the bounding box (x, y, x+dx, y+dy) encloses the impact point). Until, of course, the ball changes direction.
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I'm not sure if this SDL_Collide library will do what you need, and it doesn't seem to have a perl wrapper, but it seemed worth a mention in any case.
Update: SDL_Collide appears to have been created as a result of this thread of discussion on gamedev.net. | [reply] |
Are you sure dx, dy aren't so big that the ball teleports right past the line? It may be that all the ball needs to do is quantum tunnel far enough that the center of the ball is on the other side of the line? Maybe you could post a little code showing your calculation and indicate the range dx, dy are likely to take?
Perl reduces RSI - it saves typing
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To prevent such cases, I have generally taken the *previous* position value when deciding. "They're touching now, and it came from thataway."
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It's a very common problem in the CAD community; you could try poking around one of their boards. Or you could look at someplace like here, here or here.
Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc
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It is funny to reinvent the wheel sometimes :>)
I suppose that position of the line is constant and the radius of moving circle is constant too. In that case you can define that line by formula
[1] aX + bY + c = 0
(Note: vector (a,b) is perpendicular to the line.)
If you consider left side of [1] as function,
[2] f(X,Y) = aX + bY + c
you can easily see that f(X,Y) = 0 only if point X,Y is on the line, and, f(X,Y) > 0 for each points of one half-plane defined by the line, and, f(X,Y) < 0 for each point of the other half-plane.
Consequently, it is directly usable for testing if two points are on the same half-plane. But you want to test something different a bit. Let you construct two helper lines parallel to the [1] line, both in the distance equal to circle radius, g(X,Y) in positive half-plane and h(X,Y) in negative half-plane of the [1], with the same "orientation" of positivity/negativity. You can construct these functions just once when program starts, regardless on the position of the circle.
Let (X1,Y1) is position of the circle center before movement and (X2, Y2) is position after movement. Exploring signs of f(X1,Y1), f(X2,Y2), g(X1,Y1), g(X2,Y2), h(X1,Y1), h(X2,Y2) will give you, what do you need.
I think it is more suitable than some non-linear expressions.
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