Moving a sprite with touches began, casting and parameters in obj - c? - iphone

Question

I've been reading a book on the cocos2d framework for ios5 for a few days and have developed a small game that the book walks you through. To control the sprite in this game you use the accelerometer:
-(void) accelerometer:(UIAccelerometer *)accelerometer didAccelerate:(UIAcceleration *)acceleration
{
float deceleration = 0.4f;
float sensitivity = 6.0f;
float maxVelocity = 100;
// adjust velocity based on current accelerometer acceleration
playerVelocity.x = playerVelocity.x * deceleration + acceleration.x * sensitivity;
// we must limit the maximum velocity of the player sprite, in both directions (positive & negative values)
if (playerVelocity.x > maxVelocity)
{
playerVelocity.x = maxVelocity;
}
else if (playerVelocity.x < -maxVelocity)
{
playerVelocity.x = -maxVelocity;
}
// Alternatively, the above if/else if block can be rewritten using fminf and fmaxf more neatly like so:
// playerVelocity.x = fmaxf(fminf(playerVelocity.x, maxVelocity), -maxVelocity);
}
Now I'm wondering if I can change this code to allow the sprite to still accelerate/decelerate along the x axis, but to use touch input rather than the accelerometer, and to go faster the longer the touch is held down for? So a touch to the right would move the sprite to that spot slowly, if the touch is released, it stops moving to that spot. The longer a touch is held down, the faster the sprite moves.
is there anything in the framework to allow me to implement a rotation mechanism that allows my sprite to rotate to the position that the touch was in, so it looks like its facing the point thats been touched?

Answer 1

Well, afaik theres no method that will determine the angle to the touch and then rotate the sprite accordingly, but if you have the x and y coordinates of the sprite and the touch you can calculate it yourself fairly easily.
CGPoint spriteCenter; // this should represent the center position of the sprite
CGPoint touchPoint; //location of touch
float distanceX = touchPoint.x - spriteCenter.x;
float distanceY = touchPoint.y - spriteCenter.y;
float angle = atan2f(distanceY,distanceX); // returns angle in radians
// do whatever you need to with the angle
Once you have the angle you can set the rotation of the sprite.