2D vector math with direction and velocity - ios

Heyo!
I'm starting to create games on iOS and I'm trying a Breakout-clone for start. As practice I wanted a ball to bounce around in a rectangle so I get my head around simple collision, direction and velocity.
My ball got the following:
Point position; // x, y
float direction;
float velocity;
In my "update" function, I want to move the ball in the current direction. What is the next position considering the velocity and direction?
Are there any helpers in some built-in frameworks in iOS?
I would really like to learn more about 2D-math so if someone got some reasources I would really appreciate if you send me a link.

What is the next position considering the velocity and direction?
Note that velocity already has direction; it is a vector
Bearing that in mind, your new position is:
position = CGPointMake(position.x + velocity.x, position.y + velocity.y)
Make velocity a CGPoint and make your direction variable redundant.

Convert the direction and velocity into a vector, scale it for time, and then add it to the current position, accounting for obstacles encountered along the path.

Related

How to determine the rotation angle?

I'm trying to implement a russian roulette game and want it to brute-force the solution for it. Here is my problem. I'm going to hard code the relative angles of the numbers on the wheel (eg. there are 36 numbers and each number would have 10 degree offset to each other, the one on the top, 12 o'clock position, will have the 0 and the next 10 and vice versa). I will rotate the wheel randomly and then determine the rotation of it based on some values that I can calculate (startPosition to finishedPosition). The wheel is an ImageView. Is there a way to actually do this? For example, get the top left x,y pos for its start and end, then by some formula to calculate how much it rotated. Or is there a better way to do this? There is not much of a source code to show it, so this is more like a mathematical question rather than a swift one. Any feedback is much appreciated.
To calculate rotation, you need coordinates of three points: start location sx, sy, end location ex, ey of the same point after rotation and center of rotation cx, cy
Then you can find angle using atan2 function
rot_angle = atan2((ex-cx)*(sx-cx)+(ey-cy)*(sy-cy), (ex-cx)*(sy-cy)-(ey-cy)*(sx-cx))
Note - I used argument order (x,y) from here, while most languages use reverse order (y,x), so check what order you really need (I have no experience in IOS languages). Also result value might be in radians or in degrees (above link doesn't specify it clearly)
Your question doesn't make much sense. If you rotate the wheel randomly, calculate the random value as an angle. If you want to change the previous rotation by some random angle, then do the math on the starting rotation and ending rotation. That is just adding and subtracting angles (modulo 2π). Then you will know how far it is rotated, and not have to calculate it.
Assuming you're talking about a roulette wheel, and not "Russian Roulette" (In American English at least, that term involves pointing a loaded revolver at your head) you'll need to track both the wheel rotation and the ball rotation. To apply the rotation to the wheel, you'll just take the image of the wheel and rotate it on the Z axis around it's x/y center point.
To plot the ball, you'll need to use trig to calculate the center of the ball based on the radius of the track the ball follows and the angle. But again, always track the angle, and then convert the angle to an x/y center point for the ball to plot it. Don't forget the angle and then have to convert back from the ball position to its angle. That's silly.

Sprite-Kit: Applying physics to a projectile under the influence of moveTo

I am making a top down game where I am having cannons fire and having their projectiles move to the clicked location via the SKAction moveTo:duration. I am supposed to have wind change the trajectory so I have the cannonball implemented as an SKPhysicsBody and I am setting gravity to be a the windspeed since it is the only thing I can find that applies a constant force like wind would. The problem I am having is moveTo is probably the wrong way to be implementing the cannonball. The ball moves according to the path it should but then lands at the tapped location which is not what I want. I can't find a good alternative to moveTo. Any ideas?
You have to solve the projectile equations to determine the force needed and angle to applyImpulse. Solving the equation is only considering the gravity force and impulse force applied to projectile using the applyImpulse with your distances known from your cannons to user's click projectile destination.
Your applyImpulse launches the projectile, you start your wind and other external forces which will have an impact on the projectile path, changing it's destination from that of user's clicked.
You need to know few physics and math to re-arrange the equations and solve them :)
Not sure if you need to do all the advanced math, just set the angle of your cannon and apply impulse to the cannonball, and use the scene.physicsWorld.gravity as your wind, just make sure you also give your cannonball a physicsbody that has dynamic and affectedByGravity set to true.
To calculate the angle, you would do:
let angle = atan2(Double(touch.y - cannon.y),Double(touch.x - cannon.x))

Breakout Paddle Collision Angle

I'm making a Breakout clone and having a little trouble with the ball-to-paddle collisions. I have a rectangle represent both the ball and the paddle and when they intersect, the Y vector representing the ball's velocity is negated (as shown below). That all works fine. The problem is when the paddle is moving to the right I want it to nudge the ball a little to the right (as opposed to it just reflecting off normally) and I want the same to happen in the opposite direction is the paddle is moving to the left. I'm not sure how to go about doing this and I've looked all over. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
if (paddleRectangle.Intersects(ballRectangle))
{
ballVelocity.Y *= -1;
collision.Play(); //a collision sound
}
EDIT: Basically I want to slightly change the angle at which the ball bounces off the paddle based on which direction the paddle is moving. If the paddle is not moving, then the ball will bounce normally (by inverting the Y component of the ball's velocity)
Add the paddle's velocity vector to the paddle's normal vector (this basically bends the normal in the direction the paddle is moving) and normalize the result. Use this as the collision normal for reflection.
Vector2 collisionNormal = Vector2.Normalize(paddleNormal + (paddleVelocity * desiredEffectAmount));
ballVelocity = Vector2.Reflect(ballVelocity, collisionNormal);
i did some grinding in my head... and here are results. to achieve that you will need, moving direction of paddle, speed of paddle, ball speed, ball direction. and then by some math function calucalte angle and speed of bounce.
i think this image (if bouncing is phisicaly correct) will give you idea how to create this. can't help you with function that will handle this but i would go and try that way as in image.
You want a little friction, but probably not real friction.
Try scaling the paddle speed down by some factor and adding it to the ball velocity.

Using Ray/Plane detection for collision in XNA (3D)

Basically I want to use Rays and Planes in XNA (C#/.NET) to detect collisions between my models. But before I can do that I desperately need to know how they work.
Whenever I go somewhere looking for Ray/Plane examples I get nothing but picking tutorials - I'm not looking for picking tutorials...
What I've been trying to do is take a Plane, feed it 3 Vector3's so it represents a 3d primitive triangle, and fire Ray at it. The Ray is just a point in space and a direction.
My problem is that when I fire the Ray at the Plane, it gives me some results I can't make sense of. For example:
Say I have a Plane that represents a primitive with the coordinates {0,0,0}{1,0,0}{0,0,1}
Now I put a Ray at {0.5,1,0.5} (Roughly above the center of the triangular plane) and give it the direction; {0,-1,0}
This gives me 1, which is expected because the Plane is 1 units below the Ray, and the Ray is pointing down.
However when I make the Ray point at, say, {2,0,0}, it still gives me a number, which makes no sense because {2,0,0} is a point that is not on the triangle.
This is the code I've been using;
Plane plane = new Plane(Vector3.Zero, Vector3.Right, Vector3.Backward);
Vector3 rayPos = new Vector3(0.5f, 1f, 0.5f);
Vector3 direction = new Vector3(1f, 0f, 1f) - rayPos;
direction.Normalize();
Ray ray = new Ray(rayPos, direction);
Console.WriteLine(ray.Intersects(plane));
I feel I've left out something REALLY important, and that I'm thinking about it all wrong. Any help would be really appreciated.
although 2,0,0 isn't on the plane, the direction ((2,0,0) - rayPos) is a direction that will intersect the plane (if starting from the current rayPos) and returns a result of 1.87...

Changing angle when ball hits paddle

I'd like to deflect a ball at an angle depending on where it hits a paddle. Right now, I'm only changing the y coordinate, which results in an uninteresting deflection. It will angle but independent on impact location against the paddle. I'd like something more fun. Speed, momentum, mass and other factors don't need to be taken into consideration. Just angle depending on impact location of paddle. I've read this Not a number error (NAN) doing collision detection in an iphone app but it seems overly complicated for what I'm looking for. Is there a simpler way to calculate the deflection?
The objects are two UIImageViews.
Well, nothing realistic but you could do something so that the outbound angle is only dependent on where on the paddle it hits.
I have never done any iPhone or objective C coding so I'll just write up something in pseudo/C code.
First I'd calculate the speed, which is the length of the speed vector, or:
double speed = sqrt(velX * velX + velY * velY); // trigonometry, a^2 + o^2 = h^2
Then we want to calculate the new angle based on where we hit the paddle. I'm going to assume that you store the X collision in impactX and the length of the paddle in paddleLength. That way we can calculate an outbound angle. First let's figure out how to calculate the range so that we get a value between -1 and 1.
double proportionOfPaddle = impactX / (double) paddleLength; // between 0 and 1
double impactRange = proportionOfPaddle * 2 - 1; // adjust to -1 and 1
Let's assume that we do not want to deflect the ball completely to the side, or 90 degrees, since that would be pretty hard to recover from. Since I'm going to use the impactRange as the new velY, I'm going to scale it down to say -0.9 to 0.9.
impactRange = impactRange * 0.9;
Now we need to calculate the velX so that the speed is constant.
double newVelX = impactRange;
double newVelY = sqrt(speed * speed - newVelX * newVelX); // trigonometry again
Now you return the newVelX and newVelY and you have an impact and speed dependent bounce.
Good luck!
(Might very well be bugs in here, and I might have inverted the X or Y, but I hope you get the general idea).
EDIT: Adding some thoughts about getting the impactX.
Let's assume you have the ball.center.x and the paddle.center.x (don't know what you call it, but let's assume that paddle.center.x will give us the center of the paddle) we should be able to calculate the impactRange from that.
We also need the ball radius (I'll assume ball.width as the diameter) and the paddle size (paddle.width?).
int ballPaddleDiff = paddle.center.x - ball.center.x;
int totalRange = paddle.width + ball.width;
The smallest value for ballPaddleDiff would be when the ball is just touching the side of the paddle. That ballPaddleDiff would then be paddle.width/2 + ball.width/2. So, the new impactRange would therefore be
double impactRange = ballPaddleDiff / (double) totalRange / 2;
You should probably check the impactRange so that it actually is between -1 and 1 so that the ball doesn't shoot off into the stars or something.
You don't necessarily want realistic, you want fun. Those aren't always one and the same. If you wanted realistic, you can't throw out speed, momentum, mass, etc. In a normal game of ping pong, the point where it hits the paddle doesn't really matter, theres not a sweet spot like on a tennis racket.
Develop a mathematical function that will return an output vector, or a velocity and a unit vector, representing the output angle and velocity of the ball, givin an input angle, velocity, impact point on the paddle, and velocity of the paddle.
We expect already that the output angle = -1 * input angle. Output velocity also would be expected to be -1 * the input velocity. So if you want to mix it up, adjust those. You could increase the output angle proportional to the distance from the center of the paddle. You could also increase the angle or the speed proportional to the velocity of the paddle when its hit.
There's a lot of ways you could do that, so I can't really tell you exactly what function you would use, you're going to have to figure that out with testing and playing. If you still need more info add more specifics to your question.
The following code (C++ but easy enough to convert to ObjC), takes an incoming 2D vector and reflects it based on a surface normal (the face of your pong bat).
You could add some random 'fun factor' by randomizing an offset that you'd either apply to 'scalar' - to change velocity, or to the surface normal, to alter the reflection angle.
I'm using this in my iPhone project, and it works fine :)
void vec2ReflectScalar(vec2& vResult, const vec2& v1, const vec2& normal, float scalar)
{
vec2 _2ndotvn;
float dotVal = vec2DotProduct(v1, normal);
vec2Scale(_2ndotvn, normal, scalar * 2.f * dotVal);
vec2Subtract(vResult, v1, _2ndotvn);
}
void vec2Reflect(vec2& vResult, const vec2& v1, const vec2& normal)
{
vec2ReflectScalar(vResult, v1, normal, 1.f);
}

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