How to create a counter that updates via a mouse drag? - java

Lets say I have a circle, and if the user drags his mouse clockwise along the path of the circle the counter increases, and if he drags the mouse counter-clockwise it decreases. What is the best way to implement this in Java? I imagine trig will be needed so the program knows when the user is dragging clockwise or counter-clockwise, right? Not looking for code examples, just help with theory so I can begin with the right approach.

As you probably have access to the circle, get its center point coordinates.
Then get the coordinates of the mouse. After that you compute the angle between the vector and the x-axis.
You do so by first setting the circle point as the center of the imaginary coordinate system and then shifting the mouse coordinates to this system. After that you apply atan2 on the new mouse coordinates. The result is the desired angle.
Point center = ...;
Point mouse = ...;
Point shiftedMouse = new Point(mouse.x - center.x, mouse.y - center.y);
double angle = Math.atan2(shiftedMouse.y, shiftedMouse.x);
At this point you probably need to convert the result of angle to degrees or something like that, if you like. You may take a look at Wikipedia#atan2 for this.
Of course you can also leave it in the format (-pi, pi] and work with that, if you know what it means.
Now you track how this angle changes. If it increases, then the mouse is moving counter-clockwise; if it decreases, then clockwise and so on (or maybe the other way around, just try it). Take care of the bound where after 359° 0° and then 1° comes.

Related

Only having the circle radio, loop the circumference coordinates (x, y)

I'm making my own Minecraft world border plugin for myself use.
I have a spawnpoint, that can be any coordinates, and I check the distance between player and the spawnpoint. If the distance exceeds 1000 (that is the radio) I cancel the user movement.
So I can say my circle radio is 1000.
The problem is: I want to draw in the world the circle borders, so the player can see the world borders. I need to iterate over the coordinates of the circumference, and I dont have any idea of how to do that (my maths are really poor)
Thanks you
Usually to iterate through the coordinates of a circe you want to use a bit of trigonometry.
You create a variable angle which starts from 0 and you iterate it by the step you need until 2π, then your x coordinate will bee cos(angle) and your y coordinate will be sin(angle).
Then probably you will have to round a bit those value considering you want to use them in a minecraft word where you can't place blocks in decimal coordinates

Pacman collision detection with varying character speeds?

I am programming a 2D, grid-based Pacman game. All the tiles are 8x8 in size. In-game, the map tiles are treated as 16x16, and the characters (Pacman and the ghosts) are treated as 32x32. In actuality, they are all pulled from a spritesheet of 8x8 tiles. I store positions as the center point of each character. Since the character tiles are bigger than the map tiles, the map is built in a way that requires the characters being able to "overlap" onto blocked tiles.
To deal with this set of problems, I created an invisible Rectangle and attached it to the character's position. Where the position is an (x,y) point, the Rectangle is a box surrounding that point. This rectangle is essentially 16x16 in-game, and is in the center of the character, which allows for the overlap necessary.
This works fine if you're working with 8px as the global movement speed, but I'd like to treat 8px as "100% speed" and have complete control over character speed with a double that is in the range [0,1). The positions are stored as double points, so on that level, this is fine. I read the positions back as integers, though, since I'm working with pixels.
So the question I ask is essentially "if this moves X amount of pixels to direction Y now, will my collision box be touching a blocked tile? But if you're moving 5px at a time, this eventually causes a very obvious issue. Say you're at x = 0, moving right. The tiles are 16x16 in-game, as stated before, and you have two of these open before the third, which is blocked. So you move, x = 5, x = 10, x = 15, x = 20, we just got to the 2nd tile, x = 25, x = 30, x = 35 now we're in the 3rd tile... but wait. We can't go there, because X = 35 collides. And unfortunately, we needed to turn and start moving down, but we can't, because now our Y-axis isn't aligned properly with the grid. Our X position needs to be 32, but can't.
My question for everyone here is, what are my options? What are some ideas or insights you have? I have a feeling I'm making it more difficult than I need to.
sounds like you have...
Why not give your "pac-man" sprite a velocity vector? The vector will describe not only the speed at which "pac-man" is traveling but in what direction, meaning you can see ahead.
"pac-man" should be calculating and ultimately making a decision based upon the following conversation..."hey, moving at this speed and in this direction..in so many seconds I'm going to hit a wall, when does that happen?". The seconds don't even have to be seconds...they could be "squares".
You would need a function which takes in the initial movement vector (direction and speed) which returns a coordinate of an X,Y point where "pac-man" must stop, where he cannot go further and must change direction (the center of a tile adjacent to a wall). Each time "pac-man" changes direction, run this calculation again...you do not need to keep checking if the next square is passable. If his direction hasn't changed and his speed is constant..you only need calculate once and let the coordinate system do the rest.
With this approach, square size and velocity is irrelevant...until "pac-man" hits or within his next movement exceeds the stopping point, continue to move along the vector.

Making a rectangle go around in a circle - Java/Swing

My maths isn't that good so I'm having a bit of trouble in one of my applications that I'm trying to do where I want a rectangle to represent a vehicle and I want that vehicle/rectangle to "drive" around in a circle. Imagine a roundabout with only 1 vehicle in it, just circling around forever.
If I can get some help how to do that then I'll be able to build on the example and most importantly learn.
If someone could write up a simple example for me I'd be grateful. No background no images, just a rectangle "driving" around in a circle. I'm using java and Swing.
Sorry, I am not sure if could understand clear you exactly need. If you need to draw rectangle which is moving around inside of circle, you can use sin/cos functions.
Something like that:
double r = 50.0; // radius (it might radius of your circle, but consider dimensions of rectangle to make sure you are drawing inside of circle, e.g. circleRadius - rectangeDimesion / 2.0)
for (int f = 0; f < 360; f++) {
double x = Math.sin(Math.toRadians((double)f)) * r;
double y = Math.cos(Math.toRadians((double)f)) * r;
// draw rectangle on [x, y] coordinates
}
If you know the radius of the round about, all the you would need would be a trigonometric function and the angle which the vehicle makes to the round about. You could take a look at this simple introduction which should get you started in the right direction.
On another hand, another approach would be to use a Transformation Matrix where you start with a matrix containing two points (your X and Y co-ordinates) and you transform them to become the new co-ordinates.
You can then rotate the rectangle to mimic a vehicle turning.
If you have a limited background in Mathematics, the first option might be easier for you to grasp.
This is more an extended comment than an answer.
I would divide the problem up into several easier problems, and work on each of them separately:
Draw your rectangle with a specified center location and long axis orientation.
Determine the center point and long axis orientation for an object orbiting around the origin. Note that to get make the long axis a tangent it needs to be perpendicular to the radius through the center.
Translate the whole system so that it orbits the desired point, rather than the origin.

Rotation in OpenGl ES to place objects then rotate the world

I am developing an augmented reality application for android and trying to use openGl to place cubes at locations in the world. My current method can be seen in the code below:
for(Marker ma: ARData.getMarkerlist().values()) {
Log.d("populating", "");
gl.glPushMatrix();
Location maLoc = new Location("loc");
maLoc.setLatitude(ma.lat);
maLoc.setLongitude(ma.lng);
maLoc.setAltitude(ma.alt);
float distance = currentLoc.distanceTo(maLoc);
float bearing = currentLoc.bearingTo(maLoc);
Log.d("distance", String.valueOf(distance));
Log.d("bearing", String.valueOf(bearing));
gl.glRotatef(bearing,0,0,1);
gl.glTranslatef(0,0,-distance);
ma.cube.draw(gl);
gl.glPopMatrix();
}
gl.glRotatef(y, 0, 1, 0);
gl.glRotatef(x, 1, 0, 0);`
Where y is yaw and x is the pitch. currently I am getting a single cube on the screen at a 45 degree angle someway in the distance. It looks like I am getting sensible bearing and distance values. Could it have something to do with the phones orientation? If you need more code let me know.
EDIT: I updated bearing rotation to gl.glRotatef(bearing,0,1,0); I am now getting my cubes mapped horizontally along the screen at different depths. Still no movement using heading and pitch but #Mirkules has identified some reasons why that might be.
EDIT 2: I am now attempting to place the cubes by rotating the matrix by the difference in angle between heading and bearing to a marker. However, all I get is a sort of jittering where the cubes appear to be rendered in a new position and then jump back to there old position. Code as above except for the following:
float angleDiff = bearing - y;
gl.glRotatef((angleDiff),0,1,0);
gl.glTranslatef(0,0,-distance);
bearing and y are both normalised to a 0 - 360 scale. Also, I moveed my "camera rotation" to above the code where I set the markers.
EDIT 3: I have heading working now using, float angleDiff = (bearing + y)/2;. However, I cant seem to get pitch working. I have attempted to use gl.glRotatef(-x,1,0,0); but that doesn't seem to work.
It's tricky to tell exactly what you're trying to do here, but there are a few things that stick out as potential problems.
Firstly, your final two rotations don't seem to actually apply to anything. If these are supposed to represent a movement of the world or camera (which mostly amounts to much the same thing) then they need to happen before drawing anything.
Then your rotations themselves perhaps won't entirely do what you intend.
Your cube is rotated around the Z axis. The usual convention in GL is for the camera to look down the Z axis, with the Y axis being considered 'up'. You can naturally interpret axes however you like, but a rotation around 'Z' would not typically be 'bearing', but 'roll'. 'Bearing' to me would be analogous to 'yaw'.
As you translate along the Z axis, I assume you are trying to position the object by rotating and translating, but obviously if the rotation is around the same axis as you translate along, it won't actually alter the position of the cube - it will always just be directly in front of the camera, spinning on its axis.
I'm not really clear on why you're trying to position the cube like that when it seems like you start off with a more specific location. You could probably directly construct a more appropriate matrix.
Finally, your camera/world rotation is two concatenated rotations around Y and X. You call these pitch and roll, but typically using euler angles for a camera rotation does not result in an intuitive result where terms like pitch and roll make complete sense. It is common to maintain an orientation and apply individual rotations to that in order to update it, rather than attempting to update several dependent rotations.
So yes, I would expect that this code, in the absence of other matrix operations, would likely result in drawing one or more cubes straight ahead which are simply rotated by some angle around the view direction.

Moving Objects Help

I want to know how is it possible,I could have an Object drawn at a certain point and move to the point that is touched on the screen. I am trying to use it for my game where when the user touches on the screen, the gun fires from the position of the player, but the player is stationary.
Thanks in advance.
P.S.
Is there a visual graphic of some sort that shows where every plot is on android.
I don't know what kind of library you're using to draw all of your things, but that basically doesn't matter since you only need to know two things in order to do this:
Without going into specifics on vector geometry:
1. You need to calculate the direction (x and y component) that the projectile moves in depending on your mouses position. You get this direction by simply subtracting the position of the mouse from the position of the player:
//x component of direction
float direction_x = mousePosition.x - playerPosition.x;
//y component of direction
float direction_y = mousePosition.y - playerPosition.y;
In order to just get a direction instead of adding a velocity component to this vector, you need to normalize it (so it has a length of 1):
float length =(float) Math.sqrt(direction_x*direction_x + direction_y*direction_y);
direction_x /= length;
direction_y /= length;
You then need to update the projectiles position by adding the direction_x and direction_y components to it, multiplied by the speed that you want the projectile to have (This process is called linear interpolation, by the way):
projectile_x += direction_x*speed;
projectile_y += direction_y*speed;
If you have some way of measuring the time between two frames, the speed variable should depend on the elapsed time between those frames, in order to create smooth movements on different platforms.

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