adjusting the speed of movement - graphics

My task is to convert a movement from a straight path to a curved path.
the starting and ending points are given as well as the starting time and speed.
$ns_ at 2.000000000000 "$node_(0) setdest 90.441179033457 44.896095544010
1.373556960010"
this line above defines that node_(0) at time 2.0s starts to move toward destination (90.44, 44.89) at a speed of 1.37m/s.
I have to change the movement to be along a curved path which will be 4 movements instead of one.
I need to adjust the speed in order to get the destination of fractal path at the same time of the straight path.
I am not sure about how to get at B in fractal path at the same time of straight path?
I am thinking of calculating the time first of the straight path by the formula Time= distance/ speed. and then divide the time by 4 (cz will be 4 movements instead of one) But then I am not sure how to adjust the speed.
any ideas to help me will be appreciated !!

You need to compute the total length of the second curve, which should be (if this is the von Koch snowflake construction) 4/3 of the original curve (hence, assuming AP=PQ=QR=RB).
So your first speed should be three quarters of the speed in the second curve so that both arrive in the same time (or conversely, four third if the reference curve is the first curve).
However, since you are mentioning fractals, you should be aware that repeating the subdivision process will result in a line of infinite length : your straight path speed should be infinitely slow because it will take an infinite amount of time to follow the second path. That's when you have an infinite number of subdivisions... it will not happen in practice though :)

Related

change max steepness of slope character can climb godot

I am making a platformer game with all the basic code that is usualy found in godot platformers(kinimaticbody2d,move_and_slide, etc). the problem is that the character can climb really steep slopes which I dont like.
for example the character can move up the slope shown in the picture simply by pressing left(no jumping) he just slowly slides up
but when i make the slope just a little bit steeper the character cant scale the slope.
my question is there a way to set the maximum angle of a slope that a character can climb? thx in advance
If you are using move_and_slide you need to:
Specify an up_direction vector, which goes into the second parameter of move_and_slide. Without it, everything is considered a wall, and no sliding happens. Since, you are experiencing sliding, I suspect you already have this.
And specify floor_max_angle float, which goes into the fifth parameter of move_and_slide. This controls how inclined can be a surface and still be considered a floor/slope. If a surface is more steep that this angle, it will be considerad a wall, and no sliding happens. The angle is measured between the normal of the surface and the up_direction vector provided.
By default the value of floor_max_angle is 0.785398 (it is in radians, by the way) which is equivalent to 45º.
The situation you are suggest you are using a number closer to a quarter turn (i.e π/2 - approx 1.57 - radians). Probably something like 1.2 or 1.3? You want a smaller value.
By the way, you can convert from radians to degrees with rad2deg and viceversa with deg2rad.
I'll quickly go over a couple more issues you may find along the way:
The character slides down when idle due to gravity. To prevent this, you want to set stop_on_slope to true. This is the third parameter of move_and_slide.
The character have jitter and move more than desired when going down the slope with user input (caused by very little jumps usually perceived as jitter). And this is why you would want to move_and_slide_with_snap, which has an extra snap vector parameter which allows you to specify a direction the character should stick to the ground while moving. By the way, you may want to use get_slide_collision to figure out on what surface the character did slide, if any, and what is its normal.

Fourier transform of a time sequence data shows a diagonal line in frequency space

I have sets of data with 1000 equally spaced points (in time-space) and was able to get its Fourier transform (in frequency-space), but the problem is that one set of data shows a diagonal line which passes from the last point of the right hand side back to the last point of the left hand side. I tried lowering the samples by only taking the last 500 points, but it seems to be around even after taking only the last 100 points. Thus maybe it's not sample dependent, but rather something's lacking/wrong with my syntax.
FFT was called by the 3 lines below (which I got from other posts)
sp = np.fft.fft(y1_500)
freq= np.fft.fftfreq(y1_500.shape[-1])
plt.plot(freq, np.abs(sp))
Can anyone tell me what's with the diagonal line?

Implementing Dynamic programming Algo via threads to fasten-up

Say i have this very common DP problem ( Dynamic programming) -
Given a cost matrix cost[][] and a position (m, n) in cost[][], write a function that returns cost of minimum cost path to reach (m, n) from (0, 0). Each cell of the matrix represents a cost to traverse through that cell. Total cost of a path to reach (m, n) is sum of all the costs on that path (including both source and destination). You can only traverse down, right and diagonally lower cells from a given cell, i.e., from a given cell (i, j), cells (i+1, j), (i, j+1) and (i+1, j+1) can be traversed. You may assume that all costs are positive integers.
PS: answer to this - 8
Now, After solving this question.. Following Question ran through my mind.
Say i have 1000*1000 matrix. and O(n^2) will take some time (<1sec on intel i5 for sure).
but can i minimize it further. say starting 6-8 threads using this algorithm and then synchronizing them back to get the answer at last ? will it be fast or even logically possible to get answer or i should throw this thought away
Generally speaking, on such small problems (as you say < 1sec), parallel computing is less efficient than sequential due to protocol overhead (thread starting and synchronizing). Another problem might be, that you increase the cache miss rate because you're choosing the data you want to operate on "randomly" (not linearly) from the input. However, when it comes to larger problems, say matrices with 10 times as many entries, it sure is worth a thought (or two).
This is a possible solution. Given a 16x16 Matrix, we cut it into 4 equal squares. For each of those squares, one thread is responsible. The number in each little square indicates, after how many time units the result in that square can be calculated.
So, the total time is 33 units (whatever a unit is). Compared to the sequential solution with 64 units, it is just half of it. You can convince yourself that the runtime for any 2^k x 2^k Matrix is 2^(2k - 1) + 1.
However, this is only the first idea that came up to my mind. I hope that there is a (much) faster parallel solution in the world outside.
What's more, for the reasons I mentionned at the beginning of my answer, for all practical purposes, you would not achieve a speedup of 2 with my solution.
I'd start with algorithmic improvements. There's no need to test N2 solutions.
One key is the direction from which you entered a square. If you entered it by moving downward, there's no need to check the square to the right. Likewise, if you entered it by moving right, there's no need to check the path downward from there. The destination of a right-angle turn can always be reached via a diagonal move, leaving out one square and its positive weight/cost.
As far as threading goes, I can see (at least) a couple of ways of splitting things up. One would be to simply queue up requests from when you enter a square. I.e., instead of (for example) testing another square, it queues up requests to test its two or three exits. N threads process those requests, which generate more requests, continuing until all of them reach the end point.
This has the obvious disadvantage that you're likely to continue traversing some routes after serial code could abandon them because they're already longer than the shortest route you've round so far.
Another possibility would be to start two threads, one traversing forward, the other backward. In each, you find the shortest route to any given point along the diagonal, then you're left with a purely linear scan through those candidates to find the shortest sum.

An algorithm to skip 3D curve points

Currently I am drawing a 3D curve consisting of 1200...1500 straight micro-lines directed by an array of 3D points (x,y,z), but rendering is a bit slow regardless of used technology (Adobe Flash, Three.js).
The curve is a kind of 3D arc with a 180 degree loop at the end, so I thought that skipping some points in places where the curve is more smooth and predictable will speed up rendering.
Could you suggest some algorithm which can determine how close to a straight line the specific piece of 3D curve is?
Update
I tried to make Three.js to render these points as a single curve and it works really fast. But the different pieces of this curve should be differently colored, so I have to draw it as a bunch of separate lines and the only thing I can do to speed it up is to skip every second point in a region where line is close to a straight line.
I can not use OpenGL (WebGL) because not all browsers support it.
The difference between three points and a straight line can be quantified from the distance of the middle one from the line on which the other two rest. Probably getting the two lengths along the line from either end point to the middle one, dividing the distance by both and summing the two results is the easiest way to turn it into a single number.
So:
as the middle point gets closer to the line, the number goes down;
as the line segment grows longer, variations by the mid point need to be proportionally more extreme; and
greater local slope (as if the middle point were very close to either end) produces a greater error.
You can get the distance from a position to a line by obtaining the vector from any point on the line to the position, using the dot product to work out how much of that is movement along the line and then subtracting that from the total. If you don't normalise your vector along the line first you end up having multiplied by the square of it, so no need for a square root operation on that account. Then for the implied length calculation you can just keep and compare all of those as squared.

DSP - Filter sweep effect

I'm implementing a 'filter sweep' effect (I don't know if it's called like that). What I do is basically create a low-pass filter and make it 'move' along a certain frequency range.
To calculate the filter cut-off frequency at a given moment I use a user-provided linear function, which yields values between 0 and 1.
My first attempt was to directly map the values returned by the linear function to the range of frequencies, as in cf = freqRange * lf(x). Although it worked ok it looked as if the sweep ran much faster when moving through low frequencies and then slowed down during its way to the high frequency zone. I'm not sure why is this but I guess it's something to do with human hearing perceiving changes in frequency in a non-linear manner.
My next attempt was to move the filter's cut-off frequency in a logarithmic way. It works much better now but I still feel that the filter doesn't move at a constant perceived speed through the range of frequencies.
How should I divide the frequency space to obtain a constant perceived sweep speed?
Thanks in advance.
The frequency sweep effect you're referring to is likely a wah-wah filter, named for the ubiquitous wah-wah pedal.
We hear frequency in terms of octaves, and sweeping through octaves with a logarithmic scale is the way to linearize it. Not to sound dismissive, but it sounds like what you're doing is physically and mathematically correct. (You should spent as much time between 200 and 400 Hz as you do between 2000 and 4000 Hz, etc.) You just don't like how it sounds. And that's quite okay on both counts -- audio is highly subjective.
To mix things up a bit, one option would be to try the Bark scale, which is based on psychoacoustics and the structure of the ear. As I understand it, this is designed to spend equal amounts of time in each of your ear's internal "bandpass filters".
You could always try a quadratic or cubic function between 0 and 1. Audio potentiometers often use a few piecewise quadratic or cubic sections to get their mapping.
Winging it, but try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_of_music#Scales "The following table shows the ratios between the frequencies of all the notes of the just major scale and the fixed frequency of the first note of the scale."
There is then a chart showing fractional values between 1 and 2, and if you tweak your timing to match, you may get what you wish. While the overall progression is still logarithmic, the stepping between each one should divide up into equal stepped 8ths (a bit jumpy).
Put another way, every half second adjust one note up. Each octave (I think) will cover twice the frequency range of the prior octave.
EDIT: Also, you'll find the frequencies here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_C#Designation_by_octave (doesn't the programmer in you wish that C0 was exactly 16hz?)

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