Question

I have a program that allows you to move various Shapes about. I want to be able to return a boolean that returns true if two shapes are intersecting. This is what I have thus far:

   public boolean overlaps(MyShape s){
   Rectangle2D.Double otherShapeBoundary
         = new Rectangle2D.Double(s.getX(), s.getY(), s.getWidth(), s.getHeight());
   PathIterator pi = path.getPathIterator(null);
   return path.intersects(pi,otherShapeBoundary);
   }

…where path is a GeneralPath (these are all straight from the API, except MyShape).

One thing I’m unsure on is how PathIterator works, which might be the problem. I’ve also tried this, but I was getting a similar error:

   public boolean overlaps(OverlappableSceneShape s){
   Rectangle2D.Double otherShapeBoundary
         = new Rectangle2D.Double(s.getX(), s.getY(), s.getWidth(), s.getHeight());
   return path.intersects(otherShapeBoundary);
   }

The error is that this method almost always returns false. I’m unsure when/why it is returning true, but it is very infrequent.

Answer 1

What I tried second was actually the correct answer. Just to be clear:

public boolean overlaps(OverlappableSceneShape s){
  Rectangle2D.Double otherShapeBoundary
     = new Rectangle2D.Double(s.getX(), s.getY(), s.getWidth(), s.getHeight());
  return path.intersects(otherShapeBoundary);
}

• is the best method of determining intersection.