How to set probability for the sprite in shooting game? - cocoa-touch

My game is a small shooting game in cocos2d. The enemy generates the bullets to shoot player at intervals of time. I have created a random y , so that bullets touch the opposite edge at random heights. If the bullet touches the player the enemy wins.
But, I need to set probability for the enemy accuracy. If the probability of enemy is given as 80% accuracy? How can I set in my program? For 10 shots 8 should be straight towards player.
How can I decide which ones should go straight in 10 which one should miss. In mean time player also shoots the enemy.
Thank You.

I would do it like this.
Assume your player has position y. To get 80% accuracy choose a random number from the interval [y - height*0.2, y + height*0.2], where height is the height of the screen. In general to get accuracy p choose a number from [y - height*(1-p), y + height*(1-p)]. When p = 1.0 (100%) then the bullet will be aimed at exactly the position of the player.
This doesn't mean that an enemy with 80% accuracy will fire 8 out of 10 shots exactly at the player, but the more accurate the closer the bullets are.
This of course neglects the time bullet travels, but that can be included without that much work.

Related

Is it possible to move a PictureBox (Vb.net Visual Studio) by less then a pixel

I'm just curious because im making a game, at least trying. And i have a little ship, and of course if its moving at a speed of 1 pixel per tick of a timer (16ms (60fps)) and its facing straight up it's Y axis movement is just 1 pixel per tick and X axis is 0... But if its rotated 5 degrees clockwise, its Y axis movement would need to be (1/18 * 17) and X axis would need to be (1/18)... and that would mean the ship is supposed to be moving upwards at about 0.95 pixels per tick and right at about 0.05 pixels per tick, which it obviously cant do because you cant have less than 1 of a pixel... Is there another way i haven't thought of? And did I explain that well, does it make sense?
Thanks to #Martheen
"Maintain the real position elsewhere and only calculate the actual pixel position when rendering. This way after a few frames or so it will move, like watching a radar screen or slowed-down video – Martheen"

Why does a decrease in cross-sectional area increase the pressure

When the cross section of the flow tube decreases, the flow speed increases, and therefore the pressure decreases.
can someone explain to me why this is true, i would think that as the cross section decreases the pressure would also increase .
This is related to "Continuity Equation" of fluid mechanisam.(Assuming fluid as incompressible)
if we have two cross-sections of areas A1 and A2 having velocities V1 and V2 respectively .Then according to continuity equation
A1*V1=A2*V2 or we can write
V2=(A1*V1)÷A2
V2 Is inversly proportional to the A2.
so velocity increases as the area decreases.
further we have a theorem in fluid mechanics called "Bernouli's theorem".
which states that the sum of all energies at any cross-section is constant.
So if the velocity(i.e kinetic energy) increases at any section there will be decrease in pressure(i.e pressure energy)
Think of it this way, what is pressure in the first place.!
Well pressure is the force acting perpendicular to a unit area write ?
So the fluid whatsoever particles are exerting force on that unit area, that's fine..
image five 10 people standing in an elevator standing next to each other, these guys are too much to fit inside the width of the elevator, thus they would push themselves towards the wall of the elevator making huge amount of force on the adjacent walls write ? what was that again ? aha!! huge force per area which are in this examples the walls of the elevator. hence they are too much pressure, okay.. now imagine that these people instead of standing 10 next to each others they formed themselves as groups of twos, so 5 rows of twos instead one of ten, i bet that they will feel more comfortable right? they won't push themselves that much to the wall and hence the wall will have small force on it and then small pressure, that was an example for proving that physics isn't just some numbers that define what is going to happen, Bernoulli's equation predicted that the pressure will decrease based on logic. science works :D

Calculating distance in m in xyz between GPS coordinates that are close together

I have a set of GPS Coordinates and I want to find the speed required for a UAV to travel between them. Doing this by calculating distance in x y z and then dividing by time to travel - m/s.
I know the great circle distance but I assume this will be incorrect since they are all relatively close together(within 10m)?
Is there an accurate way to do this?
For small distances you can use the haversine formula without a relevant loss of accuracy in comparison to Vincenty's f.e. Plus, it's designed to be accurate for very small distances. This can be read up here if you are interested.
You can do this by converting lat/long/alt into XYZ format for both points. Then, figure out the rotation angles to move one of those points (usually, the oldest point) so that it would be at lat=0 long=0 alt=0. Rotate the second position report (the newest point) by the same rotation angles. If you do it all correctly, you will find X equals the east offset, Y equals the north offset, and Z equals the up offset. You can use Pythagorean theorm with X and Y (north and east) offsets to determine the horizontal distance traveled. Normally, you just ignore the altitude differences and work with horizontal data only.
All of this assumes you are using accurate formulas to convert lat/lon/alt into XYZ. It also assumes you have enough precision in the lat/lon/alt values to be accurate. Approximations are not good if you want good results. Normally, you need about 6 decimal digits of precision in lat/lon values to compute positions down to the meter level of accuracy.
Keep in mind that this method doesn't work very well if you haven't moved far (greater than about 10 or 20 meters, more is better). There is enough noise in the GPS position reports that you are going to get jumpy velocity values that you will need to further filter to get good accuracy. The math approach isn't the problem here, it's the inherent noise in the GPS position reports. When you have good reports, you will get good velocity.
A GPS receiver doesn't normally use this approach to know velocity. It looks at the way doppler values change for each satellite and factor in current position to know what the velocity is. This works reasonably well when the vehicle is moving. It is a much faster way to detect changes in velocity (for instance, to release a position clamp). The normal user doesn't have access to the internal doppler values and the math gets very complicated, so it's not something you can do.

Continuous collision detection between two moving tetrahedra

My question is fairly simple. I have two tetrahedra, each with a current position, a linear speed in space, an angular velocity and a center of mass (center of rotation, actually).
Having this data, I am trying to find a (fast) algorithm which would precisely determine (1) whether they would collide at some point in time, and if it is the case, (2) after how much time they collided and (3) the point of collision.
Most people would solve this by doing triangle-triangle collision detection, but this would waste a few CPU cycles on redundant operations such as checking the same edge of one tetrahedron against the same edge of the other tetrahedron upon checking up different triangles. This only means I'll optimize things a bit. Nothing to worry about.
The problem is that I am not aware of any public CCD (continuous collision detection) triangle-triangle algorithm which takes self-rotation in account.
Therefore, I need an algorithm which would be inputted the following data:
vertex data for three triangles
position and center of rotation/mass
linear velocity and angular velocity
And would output the following:
Whether there is a collision
After how much time the collision occurred
In which point in space the collision occurred
Thanks in advance for your help.
The commonly used discrete collision detection would check the triangles of each shape for collision, over successive discrete points in time. While straightforward to compute, it could miss a fast moving object hitting another one, due to the collision happening between discrete points in time tested.
Continuous collision detection would first compute the volumes traced by each triangle over an infinity of time. For a triangle moving at constant speed and without rotation, this volume could look like a triangular prism. CCD would then check for collision between the volumes, and finally trace back if and at what time the triangles actually shared the same space.
When angular velocity is introduced, the volume traced by each triangle no longer looks like a prism. It might look more like the shape of a screw, like a strand of DNA, or some other non-trivial shapes you might get by rotating a triangle around some arbitrary axis while dragging it linearly. Computing the shape of such volume is no easy feat.
One approach might first compute the sphere that contains an entire tetrahedron when it is rotating at the given angular velocity vector, if it was not moving linearly. You can compute a rotation circle for each vertex, and derive the sphere from that. Given a sphere, we can now approximate the extruded CCD volume as a cylinder with the radius of the sphere and progressing along the linear velocity vector. Finding collisions of such cylinders gets us a first approximation for an area to search for collisions in.
A second, complementary approach might attempt to approximate the actual volume traced by each triangle by breaking it down into small, almost-prismatic sub-volumes. It would take the triangle positions at two increments of time, and add surfaces generated by tracing the triangle vertices at those moments. It's an approximation because it connects a straight line rather than an actual curve. For the approximation to avoid gross errors, the duration between each successive moments needs to be short enough such that the triangle only completes a small fraction of a rotation. The duration can be derived from the angular velocity.
The second approach creates many more polygons! You can use the first approach to limit the search volume, and then use the second to get higher precision.
If you're solving this for a game engine, you might find the precision of above sufficient (I would still shudder at the computational cost). If, rather, you're writing a CAD program or working on your thesis, you might find it less than satisfying. In the latter case, you might want to refine the second approach, perhaps by a better geometric description of the volume occupied by a turning, moving triangle -- when limited to a small turn angle.
I have spent quite a lot of time wondering about geometry problems like this one, and it seems like accurate solutions, despite their simple statements, are way too complicated to be practical, even for analogous 2D cases.
But intuitively I see that such solutions do exist when you consider linear translation velocities and linear angular velocities. Don't think you'll find the answer on the web or in any book because what we're talking about here are special, yet complex, cases. An iterative solution is probably what you want anyway -- the rest of the world is satisfied with those, so why shouldn't you be?
If you were trying to collide non-rotating tetrahedra, I'd suggest a taking the Minkowski sum and performing a ray check, but that won't work with rotation.
The best I can come up with is to perform swept-sphere collision using their bounding spheres to give you a range of times to check using bisection or what-have-you.
Here's an outline of a closed-form mathematical approach. Each element of this will be easy to express individually, and the final combination of these would be a closed form expression if one could ever write it out:
1) The equation of motion for each point of the tetrahedra is fairly simple in it's own coordinate system. The motion of the center of mass (CM) will just move smoothly along a straight line and the corner points will rotate around an axis through the CM, assumed to be the z-axis here, so the equation for each corner point (parameterized by time, t) is p = vt + x + r(sin(wt+s)i + cos(wt + s)j ), where v is the vector velocity of the center of mass; r is the radius of the projection onto the x-y plane; i, j, and k are the x, y and z unit vectors; and x and s account for the starting position and phase of rotation at t=0.
2) Note that each object has it's own coordinate system to easily represent the motion, but to compare them you'll need to rotate each into a common coordinate system, which may as well be the coordinate system of the screen. (Note though that the different coordinate systems are fixed in space and not traveling with the tetrahedra.) So determine the rotation matrices and apply them to each trajectory (i.e. the points and CM of each of the tetrahedra).
3) Now you have an equation for each trajectory all within the same coordinate system and you need to find the times of the intersections. This can be found by testing whether any of the line segments from the points to the CM of a tetrahedron intersects the any of the triangles of another. This also has a closed-form expression, as can be found here.
Layering these steps will make for terribly ugly equations, but it wouldn't be hard to solve them computationally (although with the rotation of the tetrahedra you need to be sure not to get stuck in a local minimum). Another option might be to plug it into something like Mathematica to do the cranking for you. (Not all problems have easy answers.)
Sorry I'm not a math boff and have no idea what the correct terminology is. Hope my poor terms don't hide my meaning too much.
Pick some arbitrary timestep.
Compute the bounds of each shape in two dimensions perpendicular to the axis it is moving on for the timestep.
For a timestep:
If the shaft of those bounds for any two objects intersect, half timestep and start recurse in.
A kind of binary search of increasingly fine precision to discover the point at which a finite intersection occurs.
Your problem can be cast into a linear programming problem and solved exactly.
First, suppose (p0,p1,p2,p3) are the vertexes at time t0, and (q0,q1,q2,q3) are the vertexes at time t1 for the first tetrahedron, then in 4d space-time, they fill the following 4d closed volume
V = { (r,t) | (r,t) = a0 (p0,t0) + … + a3 (p3,t0) + b0 (q0,t1) + … + b3 (q3,t1) }
Here the a0...a3 and b0…b3 parameters are in the interval [0,1] and sum to 1:
a0+a1+a2+a3+b0+b1+b2+b3=1
The second tetrahedron is similarly a convex polygon (add a ‘ to everything above to define V’ the 4d volume for that moving tetrahedron.
Now the intersection of two convex polygon is a convex polygon. The first time this happens would satisfy the following linear programming problem:
If (p0,p1,p2,p3) moves to (q0,q1,q2,q3)
and (p0’,p1’,p2’,p3’) moves to (q0’,q1’,q2’,q3’)
then the first time of intersection happens at points/times (r,t):
Minimize t0*(a0+a1+a2+a3)+t1*(b0+b1+b2+b3) subject to
0 <= ak <=1, 0<=bk <=1, 0 <= ak’ <=1, 0<=bk’ <=1, k=0..4
a0*(p0,t0) + … + a3*(p3,t0) + b0*(q0,t1) + … + b3*(q3,t1)
= a0’*(p0’,t0) + … + a3’*(p3’,t0) + b0’*(q0’,t1) + … + b3’*(q3’,t1)
The last is actually 4 equations, one for each dimension of (r,t).
This is a total of 20 linear constraints of the 16 values ak,bk,ak', and bk'.
If there is a solution, then
(r,t)= a0*(p0,t0) + … + a3*(p3,t0) + b0*(q0,t1) + … + b3*(q3,t1)
Is a point of first intersection. Otherwise they do not intersect.
Thought about this in the past but lost interest... The best way to go about solving it would be to abstract out one object.
Make a coordinate system where the first tetrahedron is the center (barycentric coords or a skewed system with one point as the origin) and abstract out the rotation by making the other tetrahedron rotate around the center. This should give you parametric equations if you make the rotation times time.
Add the movement of the center of mass towards the first and its spin and you have a set of equations for movement relative to the first (distance).
Solve for t where the distance equals zero.
Obviously with this method the more effects you add (like wind resistance) the messier the equations get buts its still probably the simplest (almost every other collision technique uses this method of abstraction). The biggest problem is if you add any effects that have feedback with no analytical solution the whole equation becomes unsolvable.
Note: If you go the route of of a skewed system watch out for pitfalls with distance. You must be in the right octant! This method favors vectors and quaternions though, while the barycentric coords favors matrices. So pick whichever your system uses most effectively.

Detecting Special touch on the iphone

I was asking myself if there are examples online which covers how you can for instance detect shapes in touch gestures.
for example a rectangle or a circle (or more complex a heart .. )
or determine the speed of swiping (over time ( like i'm swiping my iphone against 50mph ))
For very simple gestures (horizontal vs. vertical swipe), calculate the difference in x and y between two touches.
dy = abs(y2 - y1)
dx = abs(x2 - x1)
f = dy/dx
An f close to zero is a horizontal swipe. An f close to 1 is a diagonal swipe. And a very large f is a vertical swipe (keep in mind that dx could be zero, so the above won't yield valid results for all x and y).
If you're interested in speed, pythagoras can help. The length of the distance travelled between two touches is:
l = sqrt(dx*dx + dy*dy)
If the touches happened at times t1 and t2, the speed is:
tdiff = abs(t2 - t1)
s = l/tdiff
It's up to you to determine which value of s you interpret as fast or slow.
You can extend this approach for more complex figures, e.g. your square shape could be a horizontal/vertical/horizontal/vertical swipe with start/end points where the previous swipe stopped.
For more complex figures, it's probably better to work with an idealized shape. One could consider a polygon shape as the ideal, and check if a range of touches
don't have too high a distance to their closest point on the pologyon's outline, and
all touches follow the same direction along the polygon's outline.
You can refine things further from there.
There does exist other methods for detecting non-simple touches on a touchscreen. Check out the $1 unistroke gesture recognizer at the University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/
It basically works like this:
Resample the recorded path into a fixed number of points that are evenly spaced along the path
Rotating the path so that the first point is directly to the right of the path’s center of mass
Scaling the path (non-uniformly) to a fixed height and width
For each reference path, calculating the average distance for the corresponding points in the input path. The path with the lowest average point distance is the match.
What’s great is that the output of steps 1-3 is a reference path that can be added to the array of known gestures. This makes it extremely easy to give your application gesture support and create your own set of custom gestures, as you see fit.
This has been ported to iOS by Adam Preble, repo on github:
http://github.com/preble/GLGestureRecognizer