Tiled Map Editor: size of isometric tile side - tile

In Tiled editor there is an isometric map example: "isometric_grass_and_water.tmx".
This example shows simple isometric map with tiles which have size 64x32 pixels.
I need to know size of the side of a tile, so I simply used Pythagorean theorem for this:
In right-angled triangle ABC side AC = width / 2 = 32 and side AB = height / 2 = 16. Thus side of a tile (BC) can be calculated as:
So whole tile is a rhombus in which each side = 35.777.
However when I add an square object with dimensions 35.77 x 35.77 to the Tiled, it not fits into the grid (it is actually bigger than on tile). But if I add object with dimensions 32 x 32 - it fits perfectly.
Please take a look on this image (object A is 32x32, and B is 35.77x35x77):
How is this possible? Is Tiled uses some kind of scaling, or something wrong with my calculations?

In isometric mode, the objects are projected into isometric perspective. Since Tiled normally uses pixels for object position and size in orthogonal mode, I chose to use a virtual pixel grid that is projected onto the isometric plane. This grid uses the tile height as the number of subdivisions of the tile grid, hence an object with its width and height equal to the tile height will fill exactly one tile.
My apologies that this has never been documented properly. I will get to the documentation once all the features are in!

Related

What should I use for the diameter of the camera rotation around an object

I am using graphics.py to make 3D graphics. Yes I know it is stupid and super difficult but that is what makes it fun. Anyways, I use the center of the screen as the origin point to rotate the camera around and use the window height and width to determine the diameter of the radius that you can go around. When I do this and the window height is different than the width, I get 2 different sized circles for rotating around the X axis and the Y axis. What should I do to get the circles the same size.
Current math:
RadiusY = winHeight/2
RadiusX = winWidth/2
RadiusZ = (RadiusX+RadiusY)/2

determine rectangle rotation point

I would like to know how to compute rotation components of a rectangle in space according to four given points in a projection plane.
Hard to depict in a single sentence, thus I explain my needs.
I have a 3D world viewed from a static camera (located in <0,0,0>).
I have a known rectangular shape (an picture, actually) That I want to place in that space.
I only can define points (up to four) in a spherical/rectangular referencial (camera looking at <0°,0°> (sph) or <0,0,1000> (rect)).
I considere the given polygon to be my rectangle shape rotated (rX,rY,rZ). 3 points are supposed to be enough, 4 points should be too constraintfull. I'm not sure for now.
I want to determine rX, rY and rZ, the rectangle rotation about its center.
--- My first attempt at solving this constrint problem was to fix the first point: given spherical coordinates, I "project" this point onto a camera-facing plane at z=1000. Quite easy, this give me a point.
Then, the second point is considered to be on the <0,0,0>- segment, which is about an infinity of solution ; but I fix this by knowing the width(w) and height(h) of my rectangle: I then get two solutions for my second point ; one is "in front" of the first point, and the other is "far away"... I now have a edge of my rectangle. Two, in fact.
And from there, I don't know what to do. If in the end I have my four points, I don't have a clue about how to calculate the rotation equivalency...
It's hard to be lost in Mathematics...
To get an idea of the goal of all this: I make photospheres and I want to "insert" in them images. For instance, I got on my photo a TV screen, and I want to place a picture in the screen. I know my screen size (or I can guess it), I know the size of the image I want to place in (actually, it has the same aspect ratio), and I know the four screen corner positions in my space (spherical or euclidian). My software allow my to place an image in the scene and to rotate it as I want. I can zoom it (to give the feeling of depth)... I then can do all this manually, but it is a long try-fail process and never exact. I would like then to be able to type in the screen corner positions, and get the final image place and rotation attributes in a click...
The question in pictures:
Images presenting steps of the problem
Note that on the page, I present actual images of my app. I mean I had to manually rotate and scale the picture to get it fits the screen but it is not a photoshop. The parameters found are:
Scale: 0.86362
rX = 18.9375
rY = -12.5875
rZ = -0.105881
center position: <-9.55, 18.76, 1000>
Note: Rotation is not enought to set the picture up: we need scale and translation. I assume the scale can be found once a first edge is fixed (first two points help determining two solutions as initial constraints, and because I then know edge length and picture width and height, I can deduce scale. But the software is kind and allow me to modify picture width and height: thus the constraint is just to be sure the four points are descripbing a rectangle in space, with is simple to check with vectors. Here, the problem seems to place the fourth point as a valid rectangle corner, and then deduce rotation from that rectangle. About translation, it is the center (diagonal cross) of the points once fixed.

Relationship between distance in 3D space and its z depth

I have a flat plane of 2D graphics with a camera pointing at them. I want to get the effect so when a user pinches and zooms, it looks like they anchored their fingers on the plane and can pinch zoom realistically. To do this, I need to calculate the the distance between their fingers into distance in 3D space (which I already can do), but then I need to map that 3D distance to a z value.
For example, if a 100 units wide square and shrunk to 50 units (50%), how much further back would the camera need to move to make that 100 unit square shrink by half?
So to put it simply, If I have the distance in 3D space, how do I calculate the distance of the camera needed to shrink that 3D space by a certain amount?
EDIT:
So, I tried it myself and came up with this formula:
So let's say you are 1 unit away from the object.
When you want to shrink it to 50% (zoomfactor) the new distance equals 2 units => 1 / 0.5 = 2. The camera must be twice as far away.
Moving the camera closer to the plane for zooming only works with a perspective projection. The absolute distance depends on the angle of view. Usually you zoom by reducing the angle of view and not moving the camera at all.
If you are using an orthographic projection you can simply adjust the field of view / scale the projection matrix.

Math/Calculations for infinite/repeating world with rotation

How do I make a infinite/repeating world that handles rotation, just like in this game:
http://bloodfromastone.co.uk/retaliation.html
I have coded my rotating moving world by having a hierarchy like this:
Scene
- mainLayer (CCLayer)
- rotationLayer(CCNode)
- positionLayer(CCNode)
The rotationLayer and positionLayer have the same size (4000x4000 px right now).
I rotate the whole world by rotating the rotationLayer, and I move the whole world by moving the positionLayer, so that the player always stays centered on the device screen and it is the world that moves and rotates.
Now I would like to make it so that if the player reaches the bounds of the world (the world is moved so that the worlds bounds gets in to contact with the device screen bounds), then the world is "wrapped" to the opposite bounds so that the world is infinite. If the world did not rotate that would be easy, but now that it does I have no idea how to do this. I am a fool at math and in thinking mathematically, so I need some help here.
Now I do not think I need any cocos2d-iphone related help here. What I need is some way to calculate if my player is outside the bounds of the world, and then some way to calculate what new position I must give the world to wrap the world.
I think I have to calculate a radius for a circle that will be my foundry inside the square world, that no matter what angle the square world is in, will ensure that the visible rectangle (the screen) will always be inside the bounds of the world square. And then I need a way to calculate if the visible rectangle bounds are outside the bounds circle, and if so I need a way to calculate the new opposite position in the bounds circle to move the world to. So to illustrate I have added 5 images.
Visible rectangle well inside bounds circle inside a rotated square world:
Top of visible rectangle hitting bounds circle inside a rotated square world:
Rotated square world moved to opposite vertical position so that bottom of visible rectangle now hitting bounds circle inside rotated world:
Another example of top of visible rectangle hitting bounds circle inside a rotated square world to illustrate a different scenario:
And again rotated square world moved to opposite vertical position so that bottom of visible rectangle now hitting bounds circle inside rotated world:
Moving the positionLayer in a non-rotated situation is the math that I did figure out, as I said I can figure this one out as long as the world does not get rotate, but it does. The world/CCNode (positionLayer) that gets moved/positioned is inside a world/CCNode (rotationLayer) that gets rotated. The anchor point for the rotationLayer that rotates is on the center of screen always, but as the positionLayer that gets moved is inside the rotating rotationLayer it gets rotated around the rotationLayer's anchor point. And then I am lost... When I e.g. move the positionLayer down enough so that its top border hits the top of the screen I need to wrap that positionLayer as JohnPS describes but not so simple, I need it to wrap in a vector based on the rotation of the rotationLayer CCNode. This I do not know how to do.
Thank you
Søren
Like John said, the easiest thing to do is to build a torus world. Imagine that your ship is a point on the surface of the donut and it can only move on the surface. Say you are located at the point where the two circles (red and purple in the picture) intersect:
.
If you follow those circles you'll end up where you started. Also, notice that, no matter how you move on the surface, there is no way you're going to reach an "edge". The surface of the torus has no such thing, which is why it's useful to use as an infinite 2D world. The other reason it's useful is because the equations are quite simple. You specify where on the torus you are by two angles: the angle you travel from the "origin" on the purple circle to find the red circle and the angle you travel on the red circle to find the point you are interested in. Both those angles wrap at 360 degrees. Let's call the two angles theta and phi. They are your ship's coordinates in the world, and what you change when you change velocities, etc. You basically use them as your x and y, except you have to make sure to always use the modulus when you change them (your world will only be 360 degrees in each direction, it will then wrap around).
Suppose now that your ship is at coordinates (theta_ship,phi_ship) and has orientation gamma_ship. You want to draw a square window with the ship at its center and length/width equal to some percentage n of the whole world (say you only want to see a quarter of the world at a time, then you'd set n = sqrt(1/4) = 1/2 and have the length and width of the window set to n*2*pi = pi). To do this you need a function that takes a point represented in the screen coordinates (x and y) and spits out a point in the world coordinates (theta and phi). For example, if you asked it what part of the world corresponds to (0,0) it should return back the coordinates of the ship (theta_ship,phi_ship). If the orientation of the ship is zero (x and y will be aligned with theta and phi) then some coordinate (x_0,y_0) will correspond to (theta_ship+k*x_0, phi_ship+k*y_0), where k is some scaling factor related to how much of the world one can see in a screen and the boundaries on x and y. The rotation by gamma_ship introduces a little bit of trig, detailed in the function below. See the picture for exact definitions of the quantities.
!Blue is the screen coordinate system, red is the world coordinate system and the configuration variables (the things that describe where in the world the ship is). The object
represented in world coordinates is green.
The coordinate transformation function might look something like this:
# takes a screen coordinate and returns a world coordinate
function screen2world(x,y)
# this is the angle between the (x,y) vector and the center of the screen
alpha = atan2(x,y);
radius = sqrt(x^2 + y^2); # and the distance to the center of the screen
# this takes into account the rotation of the ship with respect to the torus coords
beta = alpha - pi/2 + gamma_ship;
# find the coordinates
theta = theta_ship + n*radius*cos(beta)/(2*pi);
phi = phi_ship + n*radius*sin(beta)/(2*pi));
# return the answer, making sure it is between 0 and 2pi
return (theta%(2*pi),phi%(2*pi))
and that's pretty much it, I think. The math is just some relatively easy trig, you should make a little drawing to convince yourself that it's right. Alternatively you can get the same answer in a somewhat more automated fashion by using rotations matrices and their bigger brother, rigid body transformations (the special Euclidian group SE(2)). For the latter, I suggest reading the first few chapters of Murray, Li, Sastry, which is free online.
If you want to do the opposite (go from world coordinates to screen coordinates) you'd have to do more or less the same thing, but in reverse:
beta = atan2(phi-phi_ship, theta-theta_ship);
radius = 2*pi*(theta-theta_ship)/(n*cos(beta));
alpha = beta + pi/2 - gamma_ship;
x = radius*cos(alpha);
y = radius*sin(alpha);
You need to define what you want "opposite bounds" to mean. For 2-dimensional examples see Fundamental polygon. There are 4 ways that you can map the sides of a square to the other sides, and you get a sphere, real projective plane, Klein bottle, or torus. The classic arcade game Asteroids actually has a torus playing surface.
The idea is you need glue each of your boundary points to some other boundary point that will make sense and be consistent.
If your world is truly 3-dimensional (not just 3-D on a 2-D surface map), then I think your task becomes considerably more difficult to determine how you want to glue your edges together--your edges are now surfaces embedded in the 3-D world.
Edit:
Say you have a 2-D map and want to wrap around like in Asteroids.
If the map is 1000x1000 units, x=0 is the left border of the map, x=999 the right border, and you are looking to the right and see 20 units ahead. Then at x=995 you want to see up to 1015, but this is off the right side of the map, so 1015 should become 15.
If you are at x=5 and look to the left 20 units, then you see x=-15 which you really want to be 985.
To get these numbers (always between 0 and 999) when you are looking past the border of your map you need to use the modulo operator.
new_x = x % 1000; // in many programming languages
When x is negative each programming language handles the result of x % 1000 differently. It can even be implementation defined. i.e. it will not always be positive (between 0 and 999), so using this would be safer:
new_x = (x + 1000) % 1000; // result 0 to 999, when x >= -1000
So every time you move or change view you need to recompute the coordinates of your position and coordinates of anything in your view. You apply this operation to get back a coordinate on the map for both x and y coordinates.
I'm new to Cocos2d, but I think I can give it a try on helping you with the geometry calculation issue, since, as you said, it's not a framework question.
I'd start off by setting the anchor point of every layer you're using in the visual center of them all.
Then let's agree on the assumption that the first part to touch the edge will always be a corner.
In case you just want to check IF it's inside the circle, just check if all the four edges are inside the circle.
In case you want to know which edge is touching the circumference of the circle, just check for the one that is the furthest from point x=0 y=0, since the anchor will be at the center.
If you have a reason for not putting the anchor in the middle, you can use the same logic, just as long as you include half of the width of each object on everything.

In OpenGL, How can I determine the bounds of the view at a given depth

I'm playing around with OpenGL and I've got a question that I haven't been able to find an answer to or at least haven't found the right way to ask search engines. I have a a pretty simple setup. An 800x600 viewport and a projection matrix with a 45 degree field of view and near and far planes of 1.0 and 200.0. For the sake of discussion, the modelview matrix is the identity matrix.
What I'm trying to determine is the bounds of the view at a given depth. For example, (0,0,0) is the center of the screen. And I'm looking in the -Z direction.
I want to know, if I draw geometry on a plane 100 units into the screen (0,0,-100), what are the bounds of the view? How far in the x and y direction can I draw in this plane and the geometry still be visible.
More generically, Given a plane parallel to the near and far plane (and between them), what are the visible bounds of that plane?
Also, if what I'm trying to determine has a common name or is a common operation, what's it called? That way I can track down more reading material
Your view angle is 45 degrees, you have a plane at a distance of a away from the camera, with an unkown height h. The whole thing looks like this:
Note that the angle here is half of your field of view.
Dusting off the highschool maths books, we get:
tan(angle) = h/a
Rearrange for h and subsitute the half field of view:
h = tan(FieldOfView / 2) * a;
This is how much your plane extends upwards along the Y axis.
Since screens aren't square, the width of your plane is different to the height. More exactly, the width is the aspect ratio times the height. I.e. w = h * aspectRatio
I hope this answers your question.

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