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3D rotation ratios via mouse placement on screen - Java

I am making a 3D game in which the player can rotate their view point via the mouse to look around the environment. I firstly just did x and y rotation via vertical and horizontal movement of the mouse and z via another control. But after playing the game I realised it did not rotate correctly. NOTE: I have a global variable matrix which represents the player's angle (3x1), at 0,0,0 it seems to work correctly as up or down is a direct x axis rotation and right or left is a direct y axis rotation, but if I move my camera diagonally for example then left doesn't directly correlate to a y axis rotation anymore.
Visually on a unit circle the players viewpoint wouldn't travel the full circumference anymore and would travel in a circle that is smaller that the circumference. This is the current code (x and yRateOfRot is the ratio of how far away from the centre the cursor is in each direction between -1 and 1):
private static void changeRotation(){
angle.set(Matrix.add(angle.matrix,new double[][]{
{ROTATION_SPEED * camera.xRateOfRot()},
{ROTATION_SPEED * camera.yRateOfRot()},
{ROTATION_SPEED * camera.zRateOfRot()}}));
}
I have looked at this source http://paulbourke.net/geometry/rotate/ and understand how to rotate via an arbitrary axis which I could do but I am not sure how to correlate this into getting a ratio to find out what the x,y and z change would be for looking in a specific direction i.e. at 0,0,0 the ratio of looking up would be x:1, y:0, z:0 but then at another angle the ratios would be different as looking up no longer means only an x rotation. Any information would be appreciated, thanks!

LibGdx - Scaling Sprites, Camera and Viewports

Hell All & thanks for reading,
I recently started working on an 2D Android/Desktop project and have become stuck trying to display my sprites in the way i want.
I have a background Sprite that is 144(w) by 160(h) that I want to be able to position other sprites onto the screen relative to points on the background sprite.
I think I understand that if I create a camera/viewport that is 144 x 160 I would be able to position my sprites on the background sprite using the co-ordinates based on the 144 x 160 of the background sprite. This will work across the different screen resolutions found on mobile devices but will stretch the background sprite despite experimenting with the different viewport types (FillViewport, FitViewport etc..).
What I want to achieve is to have my background sprite to maintain it ratio across different screen resolutions and to be able to place other sprites over the background sprite. The placing of sprite need to work across different resolutions.
Apologies if my explanation is confusing or makes no sense. I would add some image to help explain but I reputation to add any to the post. However I think the TLTR question is "What is the correct way to display sprites on multiple screen resolutions while keeping a correct ratios and scaling to the screen size and position of sprite in a way that works across multiple resolutions?"
Thank, All Questions Welcome

A FitViewport would do what you described (maintain aspect ratio), but you will have black bars on some devices. Based on the code you posted on the libgdx forum, I see that you forgot to update the viewport in the resize method, so it is not behaving as designed.
However, for a static camera game like what you described, I think the best solution would be to plan your game around a certain area that is always visible on any device, for example, the box from (0,0) to (144,160). Then use an ExtendViewport with width and height of 144 and 160. After you update the viewport in resize, you can move the camera to be centered on the rectangle like this:
private static final float GAME_WIDTH = 144;
private static final float GAME_HEIGHT = 160;
public void create(){
//...
viewport = new ExtendViewport(GAME_WIDTH, GAME_HEIGHT);
//...
}
public void resize(int width, int height){
viewport.update(width, height, false); //centering by putting true here would put (0,0) at bottom left of screen, but then the game rectangle would be off center
//manually center the center of your game box
Camera camera = viewport.getCamera();
camera.position.x = GAME_WIDTH /2;
camera.position.y = GAME_HEIGHT/2;
camera.update();
}
Now your 144x160 box is centered on the screen as it would be with FitViewport, but you are not locked into having black bars, because you can draw extra background outside the 144x160 area using whatever method you like.
In your case 144:160 is a wider portrait aspect ratio than any screen out there, so you wouldn't need to worry about ever filling in area to the sides of your game rectangle. The narrowest aspect ratio of any phone or tablet seems to be 9:16, so you can do the math to see how much extra background above and below the game rectangle should be drawn to avoid black showing through on any device.
In this case it works out to 48 units above and below the rectangle that you would want to fill in:
144 pixels wide at 9:16 would be 256 tall.
(256 - 160) / 2 = 48
EDIT: I see from your post on the libgdx forum that you want the game area stuck at the top of the screen and the remainder of the area to be used for game controls. In that case, I would change the resize method like this, since you want to have the game area's top edge aligned with the top edge of the screen. You can also calculate where the bottom of the controls area will be on the Y axis. (The top will be at Y=0.)
public void resize(int width, int height){
viewport.update(width, height, false);
//align game box's top edge to top of screen
Camera camera = viewport.getCamera();
camera.position.x = GAME_WIDTH /2;
camera.position.y = GAME_HEIGHT - viewport.getWorldHeight()/2;
camera.update();
controlsBottomY = GAME_HEIGHT - viewport.getWorldHeight();
}
I'm not sure how you plan to do your controls, but they would need to fit in the box (0, controlsBottomY) to (GAME_WIDTH, 0). Keep in mind that there are some phones with aspect ratios as small as 3:4 (although rare now). So with your 0.9 aspect ratio, on a 3:4 phone only the bottom 17% of the screen would be available for controls. Which might be fine if it's just a couple of buttons, but would probably be problematic if you have a virtual joystick.

Java - Scaling a canvas about a particular point

I am more or less finished a very simple planetary gravity simulator using Newtonian physics. It can transform and scale the planets for pan and zoom. This works fine, mouse input and everything. The problem I have is more aesthetic than anything else. Since the origin of the canvas is at the top left corner of the window (within a JPanel, within a JFrame), everything scales about that point. I was wondering is there any way to either set the origin to the center of the screen, or to scale about a particular point? (Even though AffineTransform.scale() only has one constructor, with scaleX and scaleY as the args). I have tried setting the bounds of the canvas as negative numbers as such:
canvas.setBounds(-width/2, -height/2, width/2, height/2);
(Width and height are the screen size).
This obviously doesn't work as negative numbers are outside the co-ords of the panel.
So does anyone know anyway of accomplishing this? Either setting the centre of the screen as the origin or scaling about a particular point rather than the origin?

The trick here is to concatenate instances of AffineTransform.
Move the entire rendering so the center is at the origin.
Scale the rendering.
Move the center of the rendering (now at the origin) back to the center of the view.

In Libgdx, How to get the x,y coordinates on rotation for an image?

I have rotated an image in libgdx using this method,
SpriteBatch.draw(TextureRegion region, float x, float y, float originX, float originY, float width, float height, float scaleX, float scaleY, float rotation)
But i dont know how to get the co-ordinates of the rotated image.

Instead of rotating the texture at draw time, you could use a Sprite (or your own object that tracks its current location).
The draw call doesn't store any of the rotation results, it just rotates the texture as its copied to the screen. The Sprite class will keep track of the location and rotation so you can query it. (You should use the Sprite's draw method to draw it.)
The Sprite will also give you an axis-aligned bounding box. If you want the precise location of the rotated corners of your texture, you'll need to extract it from getVerticies() or compute it yourself from the location and rotation.

I don't get the question. I read it a few times, but I don't even get the core of what you want to know. If you are drawing an image with spriteBatch.draw(), your drawn image will be placed on the coorinates of the second and third parameter, and rotated/scaled around the relative origin.
If you want to know where the image is drawn on the screen, you should consider using camera.project(Vector3); with a 3 dimensional vector where x,y are your coordinates of your image and z = 0;
The vector will be multiplied by the matrix of the camera, so that x,y will be the screen-coorinates.

Or better, you should rotate your image before drawing. If you do this, you can get rotation from your sprite/image object any time you want.

Zooming in Slick2D

I'm working on a really low res game that I need to zoom in to make it visible. I know I can use Graphics.scale(float x, float y) but I'd like to zoom into the center. How can I scale the Graphics in the center? Is there an easier way to do low res games?

I think you could translate(float x, float y) your drawing surface (so the origin (0, 0) is in the center) and then zoom in. Then you can use resetTransform() to remove the effect.
If that doesn't work, just move your upper/left rendering offset while you're zooming in via experimentation until you get it right. Once you get it figured out, put that logic into a method called zoomOverPoint(float x, float y) and then you'll be set.

It's a fairly crude solution, but what if you just make everything bigger and move it?
For example, let's say you had a square and a circle,
You want to zoom in on the square which is at coordinates 200, 100
The circle is at coordinates 500, 400
So to zoom in on the square you move it towards the center of the screen and increase the size of it gradually as you zoom in, at the same time, the circle will also be moving off the screen and getting relatively bigger. I don't know if that makes any sense, but you'd probably have to figure out some complicated VecMath for that.