Hi stackoverflow community,
This is a continuation of a question I asked 6 months regarding calculating the area and position of dynamically formed rectangles. The solution provided for that worked a treat but now I want to take this a step further.
Some background - I'm working on a puzzle game using Cocos2D/Box2D were the player draws lines on the screen. Depending on were the player draws, I want to then work out the area and position of polygons that appear as a result of the drawn lines.
In the following image, the black border represents a playing area, this will always be the same shape. The grey lines are player drawn and will always be straight. The green square is an obstacle. The obstacle objects will be convex shapes. The formed polygons (3 in this case) are the blue areas and are the shapes I'm trying to get the coordinates and area for.
I think I'll be fine with working out the area of a polygon using determinants but before that, I need to work out the coordinates of the blue polygons and I'm not sure how to do this.
I've got the lines (x,y) coordinates for both ends, the coordinates for the obstacle and the corner coordinates for the black border. Using those, is it possible to work out the coordinates of the blue polygons or am I approaching this the wrong way?
UPDATE - response to duffymo
Thanks for your answer. To explain further, each object mentioned is defined and encapsulated in a class i.e. I've got a Line/Obstacle/PlayingArea object. My polygon object is encapsulated in a 'Rectangle' object. Each one of these objects has it's own properties associated with it such as its coordinates/area/ID/state etc...
In order to keep track of all the objects, I've got an over-seeing singleton object which holds all of the Line objects / Obstacle objects etc in their own respective array. This way, I can loop through say all Lines and know were each one has been drawn by the player.
The game is a bit like classic JezzBall so I need to be able to create these polygon shapes when a user draws a line because the polygon shape will be used as my way of detecting if that particular area contains a ball. If not the area needs to be filled.
Since you already have the nodes and edges for your polygons, I'd recommend that you calculate the centroids, perimeters, and areas using contour integration You can express the centroids and areas as contour integrals using Green's theorem.
You can use Gaussian quadrature to do piecewise integration along each edge.
It'll be fast and accurate; it'll work on polygons of arbitrary complexity.
UPDATE: Objective-C is an object-oriented language. I don't know it myself, but I believe it's based on ideas from C and C++. Since that's the case, I'd recommend that you start writing more in terms of objects. Arrays of coordinates? They need to encapsulated together. I'd suggest a Point abstraction that encapsulates a point (id, x, y) together. Make a Grid that has a List of Points.
It sounds like users supply the relationship between Points to form Polygons. That's not clear from your description, so it's not a surprise that you're having trouble implementing it.
Related
I am attempting to come up with a quick and efficient means of translating a 3d mesh into a projected AABB. In the end, I would like to accomplish something similar to figure 1 wherein only the area of the screen covered by the cube is located inside the bounding box highlighted in red. ((if it is at all possible, getting the area as small as possible, highlighted in blue, would increase efficiency down the road.))
Figure 1. https://i.imgur.com/pd0E20C.png
Currently, I have tried:
Calculating the point position on the screen using camera.unproject_position(). this failed largely due to my inability to wrap my head around the pixel positions trending towards infinity. I understand it has something to do with Tan, but frankly, it is too late for my brain to function anymore.
Getting the area of collision between the view frustum and the AABB of the mesh instance. This method seems convoluted, and to get it in a usable format I would need to project the result into 2d coordinates again.
Using the MeshInstance VisualInstance to create a texture wherein a pixel is white if it contains the mesh instance, and black otherwise. Visual instances in general just baffle me, and I did not think it would be efficient to have another viewport just to output this texture.
What I am looking for:
An output that can be passed to a shader informing where to complete certain calculations. Right now this is set up to use a bounding box, but it could easily be rewritten to also use a texture. It also could be rewritten to use polygons, but I am trying to keep calculations to a minimum in the shader.
Certain solutions I have tried before have worked, slightly, but this must be robust. The camera interfacing with the 3d object will be able to move completely around and through it, meaning at times the view will be completely surrounded by the 3d model with points both in front, and behind.
Thank you for any help you can provide.
I will try my best to update this post with information if needed.
First off, I am not sure if this is the right place so I apologize if this belongs elsewhere - please let me know if it does. I am currently doing some prototyping with this in VB so that's why I come here first.
My Goal
I am trying to make a program to be able to log different types of information for a video game that I play. I would like to be able to map out the entire game with my program and add locations for mobs, resources, etc.
What I have
The in game map can be downloaded so I have literally just stuck this in as a background image on the form (just for now). The map that I get downloaded though is not exactly as the map appears in the game though since the game will add extra water around everything when scrolling around. This makes it a bit tricky to match up where the origin for the map is in game compared to where it would be on the downloaded map.
The nice thing though is that while I am in the game I can print my current coordinates to the screen. So I thought that maybe I can somehow use this to get the right calculation for the rest of the points on the map.
Here is an example image I will refer to now:
In the above map you will see a dotted bounding box. This is an invisible box in the game where once you move your mouse out of the longitude and latitude points will no longer show. This is what I refer to above when I mean I can't find the exact point of origin for the in game map.
You will also see 2 points: A and B. In the game there are teleporters. This is what I would use to get the most accurate position possible. I am thinking I can find the position (in game) of point A and point B and then somehow calculate that into a conversion for my mouse drag event in VB.
In VB the screen starts at top-left and is 0,0. I did already try to get the 2 points like this and just add or subtract the number to the x and y pixel position of the mouse, but it didn't quite line up right.
So with all this information does anyone know if it is possible to write a lon/lat conversion to pixels based on this kind of data?
I appreciate any thoughts and suggestions and if you need any clarification of any information I have posted please let me know and I will be happy to expand on it. I am really hoping I can get this solved!
Thanks!
EDIT:
I also want to mention I am not sure if there is an exact pixel to lat/lon point for the in game map. I.e. the in game map could be 1 pixel = 100 latitude or something. So I might also need to figure out what that conversion number is?
Some clarifications about conversion between the pixel location to 'latitude and longitude'.
First the map in your game is in a geometry coordinate system, which means everything lies in 2D and you can measure the distance between two points by calculate the pixel position.
But when we talk about longitude and latitude, we are actually talking about a geography coordinate system, which is a '3D' model of the sphere oabout the surface of the earth. All the maps on earth are abstracted from 3D to 2D through one step called projection. Like google maps or your GPS. In this projection process, the 3D model converted to 2D model but there is always some part of the map will be tortured, so that same distance in pixels on a map could be different in length in reality.
So if you don't care about the accuracy then you can consider the geometry point as geography point. Otherwise, you need to implement some GIS library to handle the geodesic distance and calculate the geography point based on the projection coordinate system.
Is it possible to have a physics object in GameMaker Studio use precise collisions?
Here's some context for my question. I'm making a pirate game where the player sails around a large ocean with a number of islands. I've been using the physics engine to control the movement of the ship, and that is working well. However, the problem arises when trying to introduce collisions between the ship and the various islands. As far as I can tell, the underlying physics fixtures can only be formed into fairly simple shapes. Specifically, the collision shape editor is limited to 12 points, and only convex shapes. This is a problem, because many of my islands are relatively complicated non-convex shapes, and aren't necessarily a single piece. It would be nice to be able to use the island sprite as a precise collision mask, as would be possible for non physics based objects.
Is there a way to do this, or a possible work-around that I'm missing? Here's an example of one of my islands:
I can see two solutions to your problem.
1 - The easiest, but performance-unfriendly.
In the sprite editor, click "Modify mask". There should be a "precise collision checking" box you can tick. This means that your sprite will be checked pixel by pixel for collisions. As you can guess, this is not performance friendly, but will do exactly what you want.
2 - The one I would recommend.
What you could do is just draw the island sprites, either through the background or via a dedicated object, and then create some simple shape objects (rectangle, circle and diamond), that would be invisible, and place them over your islands in the room editor. (Don't forget that you can stretch them).
These simple shaped objects would be the ones to check for collisions.
I used this technique make a hitbox for complex-shaped clouds in one of my games, so I know it works.
I believe that the island you show us can be fairly well covered with a few ovals and a long rectangle.
Bonus : after doing that graphically, you can copy the creation code of the shapes from the room create event to the island create event to repeat for multiple identical islands. Just don't forget the position/angle offset !
By using the Shape options when defining the collision shape, you can have any kind of Convex polygon as your collision shape. Example:
The spot where you choose the Shape option is in red.
After you select that option, you can just click & drag to add/edit a vertex to the polygon. Just bear in mind, it has to be a convex polygon, GameMaker is very strict about that. You can also remove vertices by right clicking on them.
Ok, it's a relatively simple problem, I want to know where, in screen space, a particular mesh was just drawn. I plan on then storing that information in a data store of some kind so that when I interact with something in screen space, I can lookup in the register and find the object, i.e, click on the spaceship drawn on the screen and then select target etc.
I can't find any way of finding out which pixels the mesh was drawn to though...
Alternatively, if I'm missing something obvious regarding what it is that I Want to do, please let me know!
There is no easy way to do that. But you can use another texture as render target and render those meshes with unique colors.
So for example you give #FF0000 to your mesh A and draw it also to your second render target with that color. Now when you select a pixel from 2nd render target and look at that color, if it is #FF0000 you can understand that, the pixel is a part of mesh A. Thus you can easily pick the mesh drawn on a certain pixel when you click one of those pixels.
Why dont you Unproject your screen space coords into 3D space? The only complication I had was the fact that I'd be left with a plane, I could check if a Mesh intersected with that plane but I often had multiple candidates for 'picking'.
Check out Google for DirectX Unproject and there are various articles discussing it. It's sometimes complicated for some to implement but done well it's actually pretty nifty; don't get put off by the people online who say it doesn't work, it does work!
I'm using a 3d engine and need to translate between 3d world space and 2d screen space using perspective projection, so I can place 2d text labels on items in 3d space.
I've seen a few posts of various answers to this problem but they seem to use components I don't have.
I have a Camera object, and can only set it's current position and lookat position, it cannot roll. The camera is moving along a path and certain target object may appear in it's view then disappear.
I have only the following values
lookat position
position
vertical FOV
Z far
Z near
and obviously the position of the target object.
Can anyone please give me an algorithm that will do this using just these components?
Many thanks.
all graphics engines use matrices to transform between different coordinats systems. Indeed OpenGL and DirectX uses them, because they are the standard way.
Cameras usually construct the matrices using the parameters you have:
view matrix (transform the world to position in a way you look at it from the camera position), it uses lookat position and camera position (also the up vector which usually is 0,1,0)
projection matrix (transforms from 3D coordinates to 2D Coordinates), it uses the fov, near, far and aspect.
You could find information of how to construct the matrices in internet searching for the opengl functions that create them:
gluLookat creates a viewmatrix
gluPerspective: creates the projection matrix
But I cant imagine an engine that doesnt allow you to get these matrices, because I can ensure you they are somewhere, the engine is using it.
Once you have those matrices, you multiply them, to get the viewprojeciton matrix. This matrix transform from World coordinates to Screen Coordinates. So just multiply the matrix with the position you want to know (in vector 4 format, being the 4ยบ component 1.0).
But wait, the result will be in homogeneous coordinates, you need to divide X,Y,Z of the resulting vector by W, and then you have the position in Normalized screen coordinates (0 means the center, 1 means right, -1 means left, etc).
From here it is easy to transform multiplying by width and height.
I have some slides explaining all this here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13crrSCPonJcxAjGaS5HJOat3MpE0lmEtqxeVr4tVLDs/present?slide=id.i0
Good luck :)
P.S: when you work with 3D it is really important to understand the three matrices (model, view and projection), otherwise you will stumble every time.
so I can place 2d text labels on items
in 3d space
Have you looked up "billboard" techniques? Sometimes just knowing the right term to search under is all you need. This refers to polygons (typically rectangles) that always face the camera, regardless of camera position or orientation.