Question

Here is a program that models a tennis ball being thrown off the side of a 50 meter building.
The program should output the x, y, and velocity values at each time step.
However, I seem to be getting an infinite loop.

 #include<stdio.h>
 #include<math.h>

 int main() {

     //Intial values 
     float ax = 0; //acceleration in the horizontal direction
     float ay = -9.8; //acceleration in the downward direction
     float x = 0; //top of building at position 0 
     float y = 50; //building is height 50 m
     float vx = 10*cos(30); //velocity in the horizontal direction = 10 m/s * cos(30); 
     float vy = 10*sin(30); //velocity in the vertical direction = 10 m/s * sin(30);     
     int time = 0; //time starts at 0 seconds
     float deltaTime = 0.001; //increment time by .001 each iteration

     //while ball is greater than 0, or above the ground which is at position 0
     while(y > 0) {

     time = time + deltaTime;
     vx = vx + ax*deltaTime;
     vy = vy + ay*deltaTime;
     x = x + vx*deltaTime + (1/2*ax*deltaTime*deltaTime);
     y = y + vy*deltaTime + (1/2*ay*deltaTime*deltaTime);     

     printf("x = %f, y = %f, vx = %f, vy = %f, time = %d, ", x,y,vx,vy,time);

     }
     system ("PAUSE"); 
     return 0;

 }

My guess is that y will never become smaller than 0, but because of my limited physics knowledge, I don’t know how I could fix it.

Answer 1

1/2 == 0 not 0.5

Since 1 and 2 are both integers this uses integer division which truncates to the closest integral number. Use 0.5f to get a float or just 0.5 to get a double.