How do I iterate through the points on a straight line? - java

Is there a way to iterate through all the points on a line in java 2D?
I've looked through the class documentation and can't see anything that does it built in. If not, would it be better to extend the class and write my own method which calculates the equation of the line and then goes through each point? (Would this actually work as the theoretical equation of a line and the pixels that it actually draws in seem to be slightly different)

For something moving on a line with a constant velocity, its coordinates are an affine function of time:
x(t) = vx*t + x0
y(t) = vy*t + y0
where (vx,vy) is the constant velocity (or speed) vector and (x0,y0) the origin position (at time 0).
I suggest reading some basic introductory course on kinematics
So you probably don't want to "iterate on the line" but simply to move something on the screen, that is to compute its position at every time quantum.
(I've learned such equations at high-school, in France)

It sounds like you are trying to do something along the lines of a bounding box. Essentially, you should have an imaginary box around your sprite. Then just check when the bounding box intersects with the line. When it does, you move your sprite in the opposite direction.
This question on Game Development Stack Exchange should help.

Related

Determining IF & WHERE a line intersects with a 2D plane (in 3D space)

The following problem im working on is for one of my favorite past-times: game development.
Problem:
We're in 3D space. I'm trying to determine if a line between two vectors in said space is passing through a circle; the latter of which consists of: center vector, radius, yaw & pitch.
In order to determine that, my aim is to convert the circle to a plane which can either be infinite or just have the diameter of the circle for all it's sides.
Should the line between the two vectors in fact pass through that plane, i am left with the simple task of determining wether that intersection point is within the radius of the circle, in which case i can return either true or false.
What's already working:
I have my circles set up and the general framework is there. The circles are appearing/rendered in the 3D space exactly as specified, great!
What was already tried:
Copied some github gist codes and tried to make them work for my purposes. I kinda worked, sometimes at least. Unfortunately due to the nature of how the code was written, i had no idea what it was doing and just scrapped all of that.
Researched the topic a lot, too. But due to me not really understanding the language people speak when talking about line/plane intersections, i could have read the answer without recognizing it as such.
Question:
I'm stuck at line intersections. No idea where to go and how it works logically! So, where do i go from here and how can one comprehend all of this?
Note:
I did tag this issue as "java", but i'm not looking for spoon-fed code. It's a logical issue i'm trying to get past. If explained well enough, i will make the code work with trial and error!
Say if your circle is a circle in the XY plane with its centre on (0,0,0) and radius 1. How would you solve that?
You would check the values of X and Y when Z is equal to zero. And X squared plus Y squared would be less than 1 (radius squared) if the line passes through the circle.
In other words, you could transform the 3D coordinates to a simpler reference frame. So I think you need to learn transformation of 3D coordinates, which is really not too hard to do. You need to rotate the 3D space around until the centre vector only has a Z component, and yaw and pitch are zero. And then offset the coordinates so the circle centre is in (0, 0, 0). Then apply the same transformation to the line. You could lastly scale by radius, but to be honest that is not so important since the circle math is easy.

Using arcs to represent the vision of characters in my game, having trouble wrapping arc around walls

Right now, my game simply draws the vision cone of characters through walls. I want the arc to be interrupted when it reaches a wall, but continue in points where it does not reach a wall.
Here is a quick example of what I want to happen.
I am fairly new to programming, I have been programming for about 6 months, but I am very competent in math so please be simple in programming terminology, thank you.
Here is my GitHub if you want a better feel for my game.
You can figure out how far your character can see in any given direction by casting a ray from the character in that direction and stopping when it hits an obstacle. The details of how to do that for your particular case are going to vary based on how objects are represented in your game.
In the article you link to, it looks like walls are made from lines. If that's the case in your game, you could find the intersection of a ray and each line segment of a wall. If they intersect, then the point at which they intersect is the farthest you can see in that direction.
If, instead, you represent objects as sprites at a given location, you could start by casting the ray and seeing if it intersects the bounding box of a sprite. (The bounding box is just a rectangle around the sprite that completely contains it, as tightly as possible.) Once you know your ray intersects the bounding box, you can look more closely at that object to see if the ray actually hits the sprite.

How to determine the distance from an obstacle without knowing its location

I am writing a code where I have a world filled with various obstacles (of rectangular shapes). My robot which is a circle, originates randomly at any place inside the world. I assume that it has a range sensor on its head and want to get the distance between the nearest obstacle/boundary wall which is in its straight line of view.
I am using a random orientation between 0 and 360 degrees to orient the robot and use sin and cos of orientation to move the robot in the same orientation. But how can I get the distance between any obstacle or the boundary wall along this orientation? It should be able to tell me the distance of the first object it encounters in its vision which would be an angle from 0 to 360.
Please provide me a hint of logic how to encounter this issue?
Thanks
Assuming you know the angle, the robot's position and the position of all the obstacles, you could have a function like this:
if the angle if less than 90 or greater than 270 you increment the x coordinate by 1, otherwise you decrement by 1
you make a for loop from the current x coordinate until the edge of the world (I don't know how you have the world implemented), scanning for any obstacles at position (x, x*tan(angle)), incrementing or decrementing in accordance with the step above
the first obstacle you run across, return sqrt(x^2 + (x*tan(angle))^2) - that's just the pythagorean theorem
Here's what i think you could do.
In real game development, they uses a lot of optimization tricks, often giving approximates for better performances.
Also note that there's a lot of libraries out there for game development, that probably could get you what you want a lot simplified.
But anyway, here's what i'ld do.
identify object you'd pass through if you go straight forward.
identify the nearest one, in the list of objects you just made.
1:
A)
make a formula for your position/angle in the form y = mx + b
[y = tan(angle)x + (positionY - (tan(angle)*x))]
B)
for each object, divide the object in multiple lines segments (2 points).
check if the segment crosses the line made by the formula in point A
(if a point is smaller and the other is greater than the same X value in the formula, it's crossing)
do the same thing for your world boundaries
2: This part is more tricky (to do in programmation).
Next, you have to find the position where your robot orientation formula intersect
with all the lines you previously identified.
For each line, you must again turn the line into a y=mx+b
Let say we have:
y=3x+5 and
y=5x+1
3x+5 = 5x+1
3x-5x = 1-5
-2x = -4
x = 2
Then you replace x with 2 in either formula, you'll get the intersection point:
y = 3(2)+5 = 11
y = 5(2)+1 = 11
So these two lines intersect on point (2, 11)
Next you have to see if that point is in the domain of you're robot path formula.
Since your robot is looking at a single direction, and the formula we made in point 1.A is infinite in both directions, you must ensure the line intersection you found is not in the back of your robot (unless he moves backward...)
I guess you can make it simple, look at cos(angle) signs, then look at the position of the intersection point, if it's to the left of your robot, and cos(angle) is negative it's fine.
Finally,
Once you found ALL the intersect point, you can find the nearest one by using the Pythagorean theorem sqrt((x1-x2)^2 + (y1-y2)^2)
Also, note that it won't work for 90 and 270 angles, since tan(90) doesn't exists.
In that case, just look if both points of the segments are at both side of your robot, and the intersect point is in the right direction, it means you pass through it.
Again, there's a lot of place for optimization.

Polygon "Fixing" Algorithm

I bring you a maybe complex question which i would love your help with. Allow me to go straight to the point:
I desire an algorithm or logic in which i draw a shape using my mouse (for example a square) and it becomes a perfect square, with all the 4 sides in straight lines and perfectly regular. A human-drawn square is hardly perfect, but i wish that after it goes through the "filter" of this algorithm ,it becomes such.
A fine example of what i wish is in the game Trine, where the Wizard works by a similar principle: You draw a shape in the screen and it becomes the closest shape, that is, if you draw something similar to a square it becomes a perfect square box, but if you draw a triangle it becomes a perfect triangular box. Its like it detects what kind of shape it is and then draws a better version of it.
I want this for a game, just so you know what is the goal of all this.
Please help me figure out either the algorithm or logic behind this, or at least tell me what is the name of this kind of action (:
P.S. i added a simple image so it becomes even more clear what i intend =)
If I had to implement this task, I would store the recognizable patterns, and would try to make a match for them.
Take the minX, maxX, minY, maxY values form the user-drawn points, that will help you to scale the pattern. Choose the scaling so that the aspect ratio for the pattern would be the average of the X and Y aspect ratios.
The patterns can consist of certain number of straight lines. The pattern matches if
There are no points outside of the threshold
There is at least one user-drawn point close to each key points in the pattern
If you have the pattern matched, you will have the key points for your pattern (calculating the center of your pattern, and the size/aspect ratio). Then you can replace the user-drawn points with your image - that may be totally different from the pattern used to match (imagine a circle).
There are many ways to do this. One way that you could do it is to create a neural net that recognizes these shapes. I would generate variations of circles, squares, lines, and triangles with random perturbations to replicate "hand-drawn" versions. Then you would want to represent this as a two-dimensional array (where locations that have been drawn on would be 1's and locations that haven't been drawn on, would contain 0's). You can then convert this two-dimensional array into an input vector of n x n elements. The output of the neural net would be a vector with four elements, each one representing either a line, circle, square, or triangle. You would then train this neural net using your randomly-perturbed images until you end up with a neural net that recognizes the input with an error that is under some error-threshold. This is actually quite similar to recognizing handwritten digits.
Other ways include:
Shape contexts.
k-means clustering
Support vector machines
You don't have just an arbitrary shape, you also have the shape's path. So try counting corners. Decide on a angle threshold that will represent a corner. For each point, sample the next consecutive x number of points. Measure the angle between the first half and second half. If the angle surpasses your threshold, consider it a corner. (Obviously select the point that give you the best angle with the least amount of error, not just the first one that surpasses the threshold.) Mark the location of the corners and draw your shape to match.
Ellipses & lines: if no angles are detected, sample a few segments. Measure the orientation. If they are very similar, then line. If very different, then ellipse. If ellipse, find the bounding box and draw inside.

Calculating a point in 3D space

I am trying to locate a point in 3D space relative to the origin (0,0,0). I have 3 values to calculate this point with: a rotation in degrees about both the x and y axis as well as a "view distance". Using these values, how can I locate a point in 3D space relative to the origin? I have tried using basic trigonometric functions, but the results seem to be random. The image below gives a visual as to what needs to be done.
'vd' being the "view distance"
'c' being a value holder
'(x,y,z)' being the coordinate I am trying to find
What I am trying to do is find the point a player is looking at a certain distance away (find a point in the direct line of sight of the player out a certain distance). Keep in mind, the rotations about the x and y axis are constantly changing, but the view distance remains the same. If anyone has any suggestions, methods of how to do this, or needs clarification, please comment/answer below.
I am doing this in LWJGL, and the code I am using is as follows:
float c = (float)(Math.cos(Math.toRadians(A00.rot.y)) * view_distance);
locate.y = (float)(Math.sin(Math.toRadians(rot.y)) * view_distance);
locate.x = (float)(Math.cos(Math.toRadians(rot.x)) * c);
locate.z = (float)(Math.sin(Math.toRadians(rot.x)) * c);
EDIT:
My issue is that this current setup does NOT work for some reason. The math seems legitimate to me, but I must have something wrong somewhere in the actual setup of the graph..
I suggest looking up quaternions. No need to fully understand how they work. You can find ready made classes for java available on the internet as well. Quaternions allow you to represent a rotation in 3D space.
What I would then do, is to start with a vector representing the direction pointing forwards from the origin, and apply the same rotation that the player currently has to it. Now it is pointing in the same direction as the player. Now if you take the player's current point, and the direction vector we now have a ray describing where the player is looking at.
I suggest this link for further information on quaternions. They may look complex but, as I said, you don't need to fully understand how and why they work to be able to use them. Just copy the formulae and learn how they are used. Once you figure out how to use them, they make 3d rotations really easy.
http://content.gpwiki.org/index.php/OpenGL:Tutorials:Using_Quaternions_to_represent_rotation

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