More pointers

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As people know im doing stuff with visual basic. At the moment im on a project called pomndworld. I will give you a brief run down of what this is as that will make my question make more sense , i think.

Basically pondworld will be a nice litle haven for frogs to lay about and do pretty much as they like, but with the danger of being eaten by a monster, which is in the shape of a gollum.

Now say i have 2 frogs on the pond and i want tthe gollum to go for the nearest frog, how would i go about this. As the frogs locations become 3D like etc. Ive heard that i should be using parameters for this whicch is my reading for the weekend etc.

I was wondering if anyone would be willing to help me in this but not by giving me the answers but just general guideance??

Eddie

 

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i suppose you could use the location method on each of the frogs and compare it to the location of the gollum. You would need to build a mathematical forumula using pythagoras to work out distances.

so for instance:

if frog a's location is (3, 5), Frog B's is (7, 6) and Gollum is (5,5) you would do this

For Frog A)
Horizontal = (5 -3) 2
Vertical = (5 - 5) = 0
Since they are on the same level, the distance is 2.

For Frog B)
Horizontal = (5 - 7) = -2
Vertical = (5-6) = -1
Distance = Square root of((-2 squared) + (-1 squared)) =
Square root of (4 + 1) = 2.236

So Frog A is closer and therefor your target.

Bet you never thought you'd end up using pythagoras outside of school, eh?

 

Your right, thats some more reading for me, i barely remeber pythagaros, i can just about remeber algebra lol

Cheers for that fergal

Eddie

 

And you can extend this to 3D. (Called the 'least squares' method usualy - even though that term really implies something more complicated)

As an optimization you don't need to do the square root at the end - the ordering will be the same.

Harry.

 

Where would i find anything on that Harry ??

Eddie

 

I could of proberly helped a few years ago when I was at college and using Visual Basic alot. But I basically forgot everything I knew as I havent used it for a long while.

I also made quite a good fighting game where your opponent would move towards your player, similar to how you want your game to work.

Kraven

 

I dont suppose you would have a copy of that game would you Kraven, i wont copy i just want to loom how your code is constructed etc. if thats ok

Eddie

 

This is a good start...

Harry.

 

Note that writing games often demands some fairly abstruse mathematical knowledge. Things like vectors, projections and suchlike.

Harry.

 

thanks Harry got a load of stuff there

Eddie

 

Spot on! I was about to mention vectors. The benefit with vectors is that they offer a lot more mathematical flexibilty over Pythagoras. Pythagoras, although mathematically less intensive, can grow into a massive and quite unmanageable mess for more complex problems, in addition to there being problems if both frogs are perfectly aligned. So, you want to find the nearest frog to the monster. Given that you have specified that the monster will only be hunting the frogs in the pond (forgive my assumption), you can treat it as a 2D space, because:

1. You can assume that the monster and the frogs are floating - that is, they are on a level plane.

2. Because you are working with a plane, the third dimension will always be zero.

How do we approach this problem with vectors? You have asked that you only receive guidance, so here goes: What you need to do is find the magnitude (or length) of the vector with the monster representing the perceived origin (or tail of the vector) and each frog representing the head of the vector. Once you solve this you can easily work out which is the nearest frog in any direction, be it behind, front or to the side of the monster.

HTH.

 

I'm afraid not mate, I deleted all my college work ages ago.

Kraven