Friday, October 19, 2018

[ulpibfgq] Fun with projectiles

How many dimensions?  2 or 3.

Is there gravity?  If not, projectiles travel in straight lines like billiard balls or lasers.  If so, parabolas.

Is there energy loss when the projectile bounces (reflects) off an obstacle?  If not, then it's like a mirror: angle of reflectance equals angle of incidence.  If so, it's an inelastic collision; energy loss is (probably) proportional to normal component of velocity.

Simplest is for the projectile to always travel forever: the goal might be short distance or short time or robust trajectories.

We could have more realistic projectile motion but just the above conditions are probably enough to make things hard enough for a game.

Have nice graphics of the projectile traveling to and hitting the target.

Moving targets, moving obstacles, multiple projectiles hitting each other.

Point particle as projectile is easiest, then sphere.  Rigid uniform density ellipsoids, polyhedra.  Self-rotation becomes an adventure, e.g., T-shaped object spinning in space.

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