Sprite radial interpolation to each degree from 45 degree sprites - cocos2d-iphone

Question on how this could be done, if possible.
I have sprites in each of the following directions (up, down, left, right, upright, upleft, downright, and downleft). I am making a similar game to the old school zelda, running around a tile map (using tiled editor). This is working well, until now, I want to be able to shoot arrows/spells at any location on the map. I can do so, but the graphics look horrible because my guy will only turn each 45 degrees.
I have corrected this so I can only shoot in the direction my guy is facing, but now I can't hit them if they are not at a 45 degree angle from me. To fix this, I need to have a sprite at every 1 degree, or somehow combine the images say at 0 degrees (up) and 45 degrees (upright) to be able to get say 10 degrees via interpolation. Is this possible? Any ideas on how to do this?
I am looking into working with key animations since I wouldn't have to have so many sprites and use much less video memory (and smoother animations), but I still run into this same problem. Would like to know if this is conceptually possible and if so, a little psuedo code or snipit would be much appreciated.
One other question, if this is possible, do I need to be rendering this via openGL in 3D? Didn't really know if 3d would help in a 2d (orthogonal tile) game, but it might help spells falling look like they are falling downward more than moving across tiles from above to below?

Related

Predict the trajectory of a ping pong ball in 2D with OpenCV [C++]

I'm trying to make the basic robot arm which can hit the ping pong ball using OpenCv and C++.
I managed to detect the ball and move the robot arm according to XY coordinates using inverse kinematics, but now I need to hit the ball, and that's a hard thing.
I thought that if I'll predict the trajectory of the ball, the things would be easier, but unfortunately, this part doesn't seems easy to me either.
I thought that trajectory equations would be a good way to start, so I measured the distance of the ball between 2 frames, also I found the time between those, the angle between table and ball when the ball hits the table, but I don't know how to predict the future trajectory (or how to implement in C++) and I need some help with this.
Also, if you know any way to hit the ball in 2D it would help me a lot.
Thanks!

Bullet physics multi-sphere body getting sucked through ground

I have made several attempts to fix this and read all I could find here/forum/google. I used a CCD treshold mush lower than my objects move speed and using a CCD radius much smaller than the objects half radius. The only thing this does is make the multisphere get stuck on seams. I also tried to set ERP/ERP2 to 0.9/1.0.
[EDIT] Ok, so after some more reading; CCD will not work if the sphere is already touching the ground and ERP only affeccts objectts with joints if I understand correctly.
The ground is a trimesh made in Blender and using the obtainStaticNodeShape to get the shape. I have tried to scale the mesh to get smaller polygons but even the smallest (for the game acceptable) size does not work, about 32k indices with 11k polys, 500x500 units, the multisphere has a radius of 0.45 units.
[EDIT] the multi-sphere is two spheres on top of each other and they are restricted to angular movement around the Y-axis only, so no rolling.
The sphere gets "sucked" fast through the ground it does not sink slowly. I tried to make the fixedtimestep smaller 1/420 with 64 substeps did not give any better results. This happens most often while ascending or descending a slope. My ground is gently sloped but an incline of 20% seems to be enough for it to fall through a lot but it can happen on level ground too, just not as often.
When I did my first test I used a big stretched out cube as ground and it worked well.
So my problem now is I don't even know why this is happening so I have no idea what to try next? Can anyone please give me a solution or some pointers.
Is there any use in increasing the multi-sphere size (for the game I can not increase more than 25-30%) I have not explicitly set any collision margins but I think this would just make my sphere float over the ground? Is there any profit in changing the ground from a static object to a kinematic?
Would it work to use a raytest from the sphere straight down and push it up if it is lower than the ground? I think not, why would it fall through if it could detect the ground in the first place..?
[EDIT: additional info]
There are quite a few occurrences of similar problems floating around on forums and also here at stack overflow. Most seem to be about very small objects. Small objects (>0.2m) is clearly not a good option for bullet unless you want to increase the number of simulation steps quite a lot. My problems does not seem to fall under this category since my smallest object is 0.9m in diameter?
I have now also done a debug draw to see the normals of the trimesh that I use as ground. I can not find any errors with the normals.
I also tried to increase the collission margins of the speheres but to no avail.
I further tried to use suggested settings:
((btDefaultCollisionConfiguration)world.collisionConfiguration).setPlaneConvexMultipointIterations(3,3); ((btDefaultCollisionConfiguration)world.collisionConfiguration).setConvexConvexMultipointIterations(3, 3);
No difference.
I did however read about big trimeshes not working very well for raycasting, my mesh is big 512x512 units but I am not sure if this could cause my object to fall through the mesh?
I also read that sphere shapes has problems with trimeshes, but again I am not sure if this would be my case? The sphere I am using is locked for rotation on all axes.
I have also tried using a btCapsule but it gave same results.. Would a cylinder work better?
[EDIT]
I have tried using a cylinder instead since sphere and capsule did not work. The cylinder is working a lot better. I have still got it to fall through once though. The clyinder was jerking around a lot before it went through where the sphere/capsule would just go through really fast and easy. Maybe this could be a clue of whats the underlaying problem? A cylinder is not the best for a character shape though..
An other possible reason could be if a triangle in the mesh has too long sides or a large ratio between sides. I found a few of those on a slope where my sphere always falls through. If this is indeed the problem can I do anything about it except manually editing the mesh in Blender?
As you can see there are a lot of these questions and a lot of possible answers and I have no idea which one corresponds to my case, someone with better insight giving some pointers would mean a lot, thanks!

How to apply Orbital Gravity in cocos2d chipmunk

I am building an IOS game in Cocos2d - Chipmunk - Spritebuilder. I need to make a characters orbit around around a point, and I was having quite some difficulty in implementing orbits with real physics.
So far, I have tried two methods, one is creating a distance joint from the player to the planet, and then applying a 90 degree force on the player where an angle is created between the end of the distance joint and an imaginary line drawn at a 90 angle to it. He moves around crazily and this method is not working for me.
I then tried calculating 180 points on the circumference at a radius from the planet (which is the bounds of detecting and implementing its effects on the player) - and then in a scheduled update method [character.physicsbody applyForce:nextCircumferencePoint]; This does not work, as he does not follow the path exactly and is quite far from it. I am thinking that I need to also apply a gravitational force towards the planet which would cause him to circle it. Though I don't know how to calculate that force, apply it, or if it would even help.
A third method which would never work, but was used for testing was to set his position to the next circumference point. He does orbit, but any collision won't work (such as if a piece of space junk goes in his way.) He will simply be positioned right over any other object. This world great if you don't need collisions, are writing your own physics engine. This is not a polished way of doing things, so will avoid it.
Please correct anything I have already done and tell me how it would work, or shed light on other options and how to implement them.
Check out my answer here. It's for box2d, but you can do it with Chipmunk. If bodyA position will change, orbit will be same. You just need to change speed of body movement for your needs, just increase smoothness and slow down your update method.

Rotating Sprites (Arrays of Pixel Data) By x Degrees

my problem is this: In my game, the sprites all face in the same direction all the time, so sometimes they end up walking backwards or sideways etc and it doesn't look very good! So here is what I need help with:
Lets say I had an array of pixel data (reg, green, blue) stored in memory, loaded from a bitmap image. When I draw it to the screen, it always faces the same way (upwards), but I was thinking if there was a way to rotate the image by an amount (in degrees). This would be useful in top-down shooters, etc, where the player's sprite may have to rotate to the direction where it was facing. So, I need a way of rotating the pixel data by any amount of degrees.
My pixel arrays are stored like this:
A|B|C
A|B|C
A|B|C
And I would like a function which might look like:
D3DColor* RotateArray(D3DColor* array, float degrees);
so I could say:
RotateArray(my_pixel_array, 90.0f);
which would rotate the image so it looks like
A|A|A
B|B|B
C|C|C
..but I have no idea how I could do it. Any help would be greatly appreciated! :)
I have thought about this for quite a while and I'm not sure how to do it. I am using c++ on windows 8.1. Also, if it helps, I'm following the Chili Direct X Programming Tutorials on YouTube. In terms of experience, I have been programming for 2 years, and I'm pretty familiar with c++ it's just things like this which I have trouble with. Thanks!
D3D has tranformations that help you do exactly that
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb206269(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb206365(v=vs.85).aspx
Read about it.

How can I move a ball in Cocos2D,Box2D like flicking a real ball, with touches?

I am trying to learn box2d in cocos2d. I have searched for online tutorials and ray Wenderlich's seem to be the best ones!I am learning in a slow but steady pace! I am currently developing an app in which I will include a ball in the screen, and every time I touch/tap this ball, it is going to move like someone is flicking a soccer ball. I have coded the part for the upward movement(y axis) of the ball, when touching/tapping it. The problem that I encounter is that I can not find a way to give the ball the appropriate angle in order to rotate and move on the x axis. Let me give you an example. Imagine you are flicking a soccer ball, you kick the ball upwards but also there is a spinning force on the ball. I am trying to develop the spinning and moving across the x axis part. I would like to touch the ball, in its lower right "corner" for example and spin and move in a realistic way. Touching it in the lower right "corner" while the ball is in the air, means that the ball will move and spin to the left side of the screen. I hope I clarified the situation! I would be grateful if someone could help me to understand that kind of movement! If you still haven't understand the concept of my game, search for "parksoccer" and you will understand what I am trying to develop.
I did this yesterday only. In this case what you can do is when you touch or tap a screen , you take that point in ccTouchesBegan and then find the position of the ball by GetPostion() method on body. Than you have to calculate the angle between these two points and find in which direction ball will go from these two points. now you have angle and direction in which ball will go so apply linearForce on that by ApplyLinearForce(b2vec2 forceangle, body->GetPosition()). Thats it.
Enjoy.