No, that's what it ought to look like. The cars are moving on the X/Y plane with +Z going up. And, like I said, the car is following the tracks nicely.

Sorry, I forgot to tell you that the first 4 bytes are an int that informs us how many SimpleVectors (not floats) are stored.

I e-mailed it to you. It's not an ASCII, but all you need is DataInputReader to read the floats.

Egon, what kind of a problem could the direction markers have? I store the center of my car and the opponent car follows the markers perfectly.

And paulscode, thanks for the tip, but on a PC (where performance differences won't be that significant) isn't that a little bit overkill?

If you mean something like the following, it didn't do it for me either.

opponentCar.setRotationMatrix(rails[currentDirectionMarker].getRotationMatrix());

Thanks for the blitting suggestion, I'm about to try it out. But yes, it's really an animated gif I want drawn (but at this point I'll settle for a static one).

And no, your approach constantly rotates the car in odd angles. The closest one so far has been paulscode's latest, but even that doesn't quite do it.

And I solved the speed issue (I was working from a constantly-updated carCenter). Sorry if I waste your time sometimes, but I really try not to. This particular question took me a couple of days to ask. I think something happens with me after I ask a question (unburden myself, I suppose!) that I think more clearly. So, down to two problems. :-)

It's not supposed to be uneven, it sleeps 40 milliseconds, and draws. Obviously some parts of the model might take a little longer to render, but it should hardly be perceptible, and it really really is.

Egon, on yet a separate question (not to draw too much attention away from the bigger turning problem), how do I draw an image onto the buffer using the hardware renderer outside of an AWTGLCanvas? I've tried reading the lwjgl docs, but I found nothing there. I even tried looking for my C OpenGL programs of so many years ago, but I can't find them right now. Do you know?

I applied your change and the result is conservative (it does most of the rotation, maybe 70% of it, but never quite enough). Also, since my streets always turn left, I didn't get to test a right turn, although I supposed your applet does. Here's a quick question: why doesn't the following code produce an even speed?


float translationAmount = 72f/distance; //MOVE % OF distance THAT EQUALS 72
SimpleVector directionMoved;
directionMoved = moveTowardsMinusZ(opponentCar, rails[currentDirectionMarker], translationAmount);
//THE DISTANCE IS UPDATED WHENEVER calculateDistance(opponentCar.getTransformedCenter(), rails[currentDirectionMarker]) < 1f AND currentDirectionMarker IS INCREMENTED
//THEN THE MOVETOWARDS METHOD CALCULATES THE DELTAS:
float deltaX = (direction.x -origin.x)*translationAmount;
float deltaY = (direction.y -origin.y)*translationAmount;


Thanks, man, and I wish I could take credit for the model, but I bought it. :-) I'm preparing a website with a bunch of things I did over the years (since I didn't finish a lot there's a lot to do), but I'll be posting the links here as I finish them.

Almost right, except that I'm only rotating the car every time I increment the array index of world coordinates, as opposed to in every iteration of the game loop.

The world coordinates are invisible. I store them by setting the program in store mode, at which point the opponent car doesn't move and I drive in its place while my program stores my position. The rest you can see in the screenshot:

Egon: it's a bad thing in that the car rotates awckwardly even on straight lines. Then again, if the formula eventually works...

Paulscode: yeah, the child object is directly in front of it, but no, the car isn't using pointer to move, it's chasing an array of SimpleVectors. I put the pointer there just so I could get a triangle from which to calculate theta. And the car is moving exactly as it should except that after the first turn it's not facing forward.

Here's a note: while Egon's code rotates the car even on straight lines, paulscode's code doesn't. So if either of you is reading, I think that's an important observation. I'll try and get this thing working in applet form and post a link here tomorrow.

Yes, and it loads fine. Ever since they made appletviewer (and just to be clear I'm not using it, I'm using Explorer and Firefox) security permission-aware, I've found applet writing and testing to be a nightmare, which is why I first wrote this program as an application. But I'll solve it soon enough, I suppose. Really, my only rush is that I don't want you to go offline! :-)

I took it out and it doesn't even get to the OutofMemoryError, but that was a good suggestion.