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Feature
A-OK! The Wings of Mercury
Programming the Right Stuff, Part Two
Issue: 2.5 (May/June 2004)
Author: Joe Nastasi
Author Bio: Joe Nastasi is the president of Pyramid Design, a software development firm and the developers of A-OK! The Wings of Mercury and FTP Suite.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 26,373
Starting Page Number: 12
RBD Number: 2509
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
More 3D Woes
Boy, if I could turn back the hands of time! One of the big issues I faced was the lack of collision detection. Even something as simple as knowing when the spacecraft hit the water during splashdown became a mini-nightmare. While I was certainly keeping track of the altitude, all my calculations were based on the center point of the current spacecraft model. So when I had to test to see if the water (or land) model had reached the spacecraft (remember, I am moving the world around the spacecraft to prevent math errors), I always had to factor in an offset depending on what configuration the spacecraft was in (possibly the entire launch stack is crashing into the ocean) and what orientation it was in. All this to determine when we have hit the ocean.
As per the theme of this product's development, I labored over the collision issue, essentially solved the problem (though not very well), and a couple of months later an RB3D API update produced the Bounds3D class which solved all these problems!
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