vbGore Free Online RPG Engine

So, I was messing with XNA and found the MathHelper.Clamp method to be useful. But when I put in

it didn't work. I looked it up on MSDN and found that it uses radians and not degrees. So, what my question is what use are they? Basically its just another way to say degrees.

Radians are easier to use than degrees when doing certain types of math or drawing graphs, its just like the difference between using fractions and decimals.

So, someobject has its rotation stored as a radian how in the hell would this make it move... not to mention it makes the objects move poorly based off the rotation of someobject. If you aim straight up or at 0 degrees the angle is fine but anywhere in between the angle is off.

Radians are useful in trig/calc/physics. Essentially, instead of having a range of 0 to 360, you have a range of 0 to 2pi. Its a very simple difference, but very useful to have it as a radian instead in most cases.

As for your second post, I don't really understand it.

Yeah, I fixed the second part its just that I don't get how it works. Mainly because I've never used or seen (float) in front of something before I'm assuming it converts the value to a float but I could be wrong. And geometry sin/cos/tan was the only test I failed when I took geometry.

The thing in the brackets before the expression is a type cast. You can type cast any number with another number and interfaces or child/ancestor classes, you can think of it simply as converting from one type to another. It's actually quite simple how it works if you understand lower level OOP.

In your case its probably a double to a float.

If you don't want to use sin or cos, you can use a rotation matrix. However its hard to understand and easy to forget, but once you know it, it becomes much easier than trig, its also a lot faster (brain and cpu wise) if you don't need exact calculations, even better if you understand magic numbers like sqrt3/2 as its based on the unit circle.

As for the Vector2D i think you need to do a bit of research on trig. If the parameter requires radians then you will have to divide the rotation by 180 before you use it as an argument (unless the rotation is also in radians). Also as sin is the vertical component, of course the angle is going to be off if it the point is 5 times higher than it is to the left or right.



If by that you mean for rendering such as NotExistants Vector2D im not sure how that could possibly be. Both OpenGL and DX8 use floating-point degrees and 3 rotation matrices, i dunno about the other DX's as i haven't tried. If not then meh i dunno, its only been useful when there isn't a calculator involved, which is why i don't think its particularly suitable for programming.

Yeah, that was the problem I needed to multiply the X and Y by 5 else the speed was messed up and the objects would go up faster. Oh, and the rotation is stored as a radian too. I actually went and looked up sine, cosine and tangent again and this time around it seemed pretty easy. The power of the internet lol it tough me things my teacher tried to explain to me a million times and it was pretty easy.

So in the end what this is really doing is taking the angle of the object and evaluating an imaginary triangle to see how high it is to get two of the sides and its using them to set the acceleration for another object to match the angle of the first object.

I still don't get it fully but I get what its doing to an extent now I may look at it a little longer to see exactly how it works but right now I understand the concept.