I’ll try to keep this short and sweet. One approach that is often used to solve these problems in simulation is a Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree. To give at least a little credibility to my post, I’ll admit I studied these, and motion planning was my research lab’s area of expertise (probabilistic motion planning). The canonical … Read more
Your quadtree structure isn’t optimal. You’re right to store 4 subtrees per node, but actual objects should only be stored inside the leaves, not inner nodes. Therefore the collection holding the actual objects needs to be moved to the leaves. Let’s have a look at the implementation of the operations: Insert an object into the … Read more
Using a game engine or not is a preference. It will depend on what exactly you are after. If you want to learn about the underlying concepts of rendering, collision detection, etc, then writing these yourself is perfectly acceptable, and a lot of fun. On the other hand, if you just want to get the … Read more
It flows from the definition of a normal. Suppose you have the normal, N, and a vector, V, a tangent vector at the same position on the object as the normal. Then by definition N·V = 0. Tangent vectors run in the same direction as the surface of an object. So if your surface is … Read more
Unfortunately there are different conventions on how to define these things (and roll, pitch, yaw are not quite the same as Euler angles), so you’ll have to be careful. If we define pitch=0 as horizontal (z=0) and yaw as counter-clockwise from the x axis, then the direction vector will be x = cos(yaw)*cos(pitch) y = … Read more