More Work on Collisions!

Scrawlings of a mad man

I have been struggling to successfully implement collisions between objects in my physics engine. It turned out a lot harder than I originally thought it would be. So after many revisions and a hours of frustration, I decided I needed to just sit down and write everything out. On the right is a picture of my desk, taken from my phone. This is how I tested out different mathematical algorithms and discerned which ones work all the time, which ones work some of the time, and which ones don't work at all. Writing down everything certainly helped my thought process, but I suspect that my peers here at ASU now think I am insane.

The red ball was placed 1 unit to the left of the blue one.

Here's what I managed so far. I have written a function of the Entity class that takes the angle of incidence of a collision and calculates its new angle for movement. This method took ages to get right, and now works on all 360 degrees. I have yet to add a dampening force yet, so currently the collisions seem overly explosive, but I'll get to it eventually! I have also written an event handler for the collision event which calculates the angles of incidence of both entities and calls their respective functions. This handler, however, needs a lot of work, because after only a little testing I have found some strange issues that most likely stem from there being no delay between bounces. Sometimes this results in the balls getting stuck inside of each other and weirdly vibrating off of the screen. A rather traumatic bug if you ask me. Here's a screenshot of a successful collision! Woo!


As always, thanks for reading!

- Jeff