Chipmunk physics: Velocity question - iphone

I'm making an iPhone game where the main actor is a ball that rolls depending on the device's accelerometer rotation.
I haven't started on this part of the coding yet, but I was wondering if you guys had a nice way of solving this:
I tried looking a little into chipmunk, and I noticed that bodies have the property v, which is a point containing x and y velocities.
I was thinking it'd be a bad idea to just do like:
playerBody->v = ccp(accelerometer.x * 5, playerBody->v.y);
because it'd just roll up of walls and stuff,
is there a better solution to do this?

Basically, in a perfectly elastic collision (no energy lost) with a wall, which I'm guessing is what you want, the component of the velocity that is normal (perpendicular) to the wall is reversed (inverted). The tangential components stay the same. For instance, if the wall is along the x-axis, then v_y = -v_y. I haven't used Chipmunk so I won't attempt to tell you the actual syntax for doing this.

Related

Forward facing vector is a bit offset

I am making an FPS game and I need for the forward facing vector to hit exactly where the crosshair is aiming.
This is my current blueprint.
It takes all references from the camera position where the players head should be. (as it usually is in FPS games).
When "shooting" the vector it is slightly offset though. (pink dot near crosshair)
Things I have tried:
Increasing distance of vector makes the problem go away but it then becomes inconsistent, which means it's a bad solution to the problem :(
Manually changing axis values, but that was also very inconsistent.
Changing between 3 different nodes of taking rotation from the camera, they all (didn't) work the same way :/
Maybe there is an issue of the values that I am taking, although the starting position of the camera seems to be correct.
Thank you for any insight you may have!
Suggested by user Ruzihm the issue was that the crosshair was off-center. My blueprints were actually okay.
So for anyone looking see if your crosshair is in the center.

How do I make a SKSpriteNode avoid another SKSpriteNode?

I am working on an AI mode for a SpriteKit game I am making in Xcode. I have dynamic physics bodies which can be launched towards the AI. I want to make it so that when one of these bodies is within a certain radius of the AI, the AI tries to dodge it. I have started working through different routes and got decent results.
1st method (pseudocode): Check AI.position.x and AI.position.y and compare to incomingSprite.position.x and incomingSprite.position.y. Break this comparison into quadrants if both x and y are within radius. (i.e. incomingSprite is bottom left relative to AI, bottom right, etc). Based on this info move the AI's position to move away from it.
cons:
-lots of code and calculations in update function to account for multiple incoming sprites
-depending on dx and dy of incoming sprite, the AI often make illogical decision
2nd method (pseudocode): Calculate distance from AI to incomingSprite. Then check dx and dy of incomingSprite and set dx and dy to go in reverse direction of incomingSprite. This seems logical. I am a little rusty on reversing vectors to do this. I feel like this might be possibly a good idea though.
Is there a better method to accomplish this? Perhaps a force field on the magnet I could use to repel the AI at a certain strength so that if the incomingSprite is fast enough it will override and still collide anyway? Im concerned about memory as most of the AI logic is in the update function, which can cause big problems if I'm not careful.
Edit: I decided to use the electric field and gave the incoming sprites a positive charge so that they are repelled by the AI. This makes things accurate/lightweight and more interesting. If the incoming sprites are fast enough, they will break through the electric field and still collide with AI. This also gives room as an additional difficulty parameter in my game (the stronger the field, the harder it is to get the incoming sprites to collide with the AI).

Is this a physics bug with WheelCollider or am I doing something wrong?

I am trying to create a drivable car model using Unity's WheelColliders and I have set up my CarControl.cs script like this: https://gist.github.com/victorbstan/e5903829576eaf6ce5e3
I am encountering two problems:
The car slightly turns without any steering being applied on a completely flat surface.
The vehicle accelerates and decelerates inconsistently given the torque applied to it.
To get a better idea of what I mean, I made a video recording of the setup and play-through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuMT_AzRHbA&feature=youtu.be
Without really digging into it, my initial impression is that your WheelCollider friction values are probably too low. Increasing the forward friction will probably help with your inconsistent acceleration and the sideways friction will probably address your steering issue.

How to make a sprite have gravity?

xcode 5 iOS7 sprite kit.
My wish is to make a sprite that has its own gravity.
Like a planet. If another sprite comes within a certain range of it, it will slowly pull the other sprite closer.
I have two sprites. One moving and one stationary. When the moving sprite gets in a given distance of the stationary sprite the stationary sprite gravity should slowly pull the other sprite towards it. This way the moving sprite would change its path in a soft curve.
My idea would be to calculate the distance from the stationary object to any other object and if close enough start pulling and if the moving object gets out of range ageing, then stop pulling.
Would probably need to research some vector calculation.
Thats my immediate thoughts.
Is this possible and how? Does it already exist?
A friend of mine did this for his physics dissertation. multibody gravity simulation. So yeah you can but you need to be willing to learn some maths. Apparently there is a clever optimisation to make it run decently nlog(n) rather than n^2). you probably want to ask this on the physics version of stack overflow to get a good answer. I have the code at home ... will post it later but you will want an explanation - i used it in an xna app. Its badass once you get it working - although if you want naturally orbiting objects then you will want to code them using parametric equations for easy and cool orbits. Simply because its hard to solve and with time even using double will result in some errors (the good implementations also work out the error and adjust - again will post later). But the real problem is solving for stable orbits. You then use the algorithm for free moving bodies such and player objects / npcs. Although solving accurate movement for npc in a changing field is v hard.
you want to look at this question: Jon Purdys answer is the one you want
multi body physics - gravity
and this one (which is linked from above) ...
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/19404
There is not a dead-simple way of doing that in any platform as far as I know maybe except for some game engines/platforms that export for different platforms (cocos2d, construct 2 etc).
What you need is a physics engine whether you write one (which is a complicated but fun thing to do) or use an available one.
Luckily I've found a link describing the usage of the famous 2D physics engine "Box2D" on iOS.
This one explains how you can include Box2D in an openGL application (but you can apply this to other environments (sprite kit) I think altough I'm not an iOS guy);
http://www.iforce2d.net/b2dtut/setup-ios
Anyways, you now know what to look for...
For iOS 8.0+ : you have SKFieldNode : radialGravityField()
For iOS 8.0- : one solution could be : 3 to 9
add your sprite ( planet ) with its physics
add an invisible SKNode ( the gravity zone ) with its own physics, as a child of your sprite, but with a radius much more than your sprite's one
you have a little explanation about invisible node here : https://developer.apple.com/documentation/spritekit/skphysicsworld
both, your sprite and the invisible node are centered in a zero gravity world
we look for contact and not collision ( set correctly your bit masks )
when any object get in contact with the invisible node ( gravity zone ), first you remove any moving action or impulse from it and then we add to this object an SKAction to move it toward the center of your sprite ( planet )
at second contact between this object and your sprite ( planet ), you remove all actions again from the object with a velocity = zero

Using iPhone/iPod Touch acceleration to rotate a 3D object

I'm trying to use an iPhone/iPod acceleration to manipulate directly a 3D object.
For that I've been searching lot's of stuff (Euler angles, Quaternions, etc).
I'm using OpenSG, where I have a 3D environment and want to manipulate a certain object (just rotating in all possible iPhone/iPod degrees of freedom using only accelerometer).
So, I tried to figure it out a solution for this problem but it still doesn't have the expected result and get some weird rotations in some angles.
Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Or, is there a better way of doing this without using quaternions?
The acceleration variable is a Vec3f containing the accelerometer values from iPhone/iPod filtered with a low-pass filter.
acceleration.normalize();
Vec3f reference = OSG::Vec3f(0, 0, 1);
OSG::Vec3f axis = acceleration.cross( reference );
angle = acos( acceleration.dot( reference ) );
OSG::Quaternion quat;
quat.setValueAsAxisRad(axis, angle);
After this code, I update my scene node using quaternion quat.
I wanted to do the exact same thing and just tried it, I hadn't played around with an accelerometer before and it seemed like it should be possible.
The problem is that if you set your iPhone on a table and then slowly spin it around and observe the output of the accelerometer it basically doesn't change (one gravity down). If you tilt it up/down on any of the four edges you will see the output change.
In other words you know that your table top is tilting top/bottom or left/right, but you can't tell that you are spinning it. So you can map this tilt to two rotations of a 3D object.
You could probably use the compass for the horizontal rotation, I couldn't try because I was prototyping in the Unity Game Engine and it doesn't seem to support compass yet.
The ever wonderful Brad Larson posted an excellent description of his initial experiences of a 3d viewer while writing his Moleculs app.
His method for rotations was achieved as follows:
GLfloat currentModelViewMatrix[16];
glGetFloatv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, currentModelViewMatrix);
glRotatef(xRotation, currentModelViewMatrix[1], currentModelViewMatrix[5], currentModelViewMatrix[9]);
glGetFloatv(GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, currentModelViewMatrix);
glRotatef(yRotation, currentModelViewMatrix[0], currentModelViewMatrix[4], currentModelViewMatrix[8]);
but whether or not this is helpful I can't recommend this blog entry enough Brad learns a lesson or two
Editing to add that I may have misread the question, but will keep the post here as it will likely help people searching with similar keywords.