Now my time has come. I will finally use my Master’s in Physics for a private company.
Never mind that this is to simulate a virtual cannon that shoots confetti when someone accomplishes their weekly goals.
This is what I have trained for!
Displacement (yf-yi) - how far the confetti travels.
Velocity (vf, vi) - the speed and direction of the confetti.
Acceleration (a) - the change in velocity (in our case, due to gravity).
Time (t) - the duration of the confetti’s flight.
These are the components we need to understand the kinematic equations.
𝑣𝑓=𝑣i+𝑎𝑡
y𝑓=yi+𝑣i𝑡+1/2*𝑎*𝑡^2
Playing around with my makeshift cannon these are the equations I will need to use in order to create parabolic motion.
I will say this was somewhat easy with a bump in the road.
The equations themselves were relatively easy to implement themselves, however when I began placing the formulas something happened.
First off, it was tough to get the signs and the constants right. In a screen the 0 is the top of the screen and the bottom is the height of the screen.
Not the biggest deal but without writing anything down this caused a little obstacle.
The second part, was making sure the constants were right. Since I was able to get the time between frames, I used that as my initial time, however it was measured in ms
so it was quite large and pushed my confetti off the screen quickly. I used an arbitrary number to make the intervals of time smaller. Along with there were a few other parameters to manipulate in order to have something visible on the screen.
The third and embarrassing part it that it was not following a nice parabolic curve like I thought it would. This is embarrassing because I should have known better.
When I used the displacement formula everything was correct, however I left the initial velocity the same after every displacement.
I forgot to change the velocity along with the displacement, that’s why it had an almost linear curve.
Once I changed my y-velocity after every time interval I finally got that big beautiful curve that I desired.
Now it looks like a ball of confetti that just follows a parabola. Tomorrow I will try to finish the rest of the simulation.
Best,
Merl