Question

I have an app that creates a variable number of ScatterviewItems based on which tagged object is placed on the surface table.

The ScatterViewItems are added programatically to the ScatterView based on info looked up in a DB

The Scatterview does a good job of displaying this info

However, I would like them to be

1. evenly distributed across the table and

2. not have any items overlapping

Any ideas how to do that?

Answer 1

Sounds like you need collision detection.

There’s two parts to this problem: detection and resolution. Detection is seeing if any item’s bounding intersects with any other item’s bounding. If the items are retangular or circular this is pretty straightforeward. It can get complex if you’re dealing with other geometries.

Resoltion is what to do once you’ve detected a collision. Google will help you find the myriad algorithms for this. Here’s a couple links to stackoverflow discussions: WPF: Collision Detection with Rotated Squares, Applying Coefficient of Restitution in a collision resolution method, Best way to detect collision between sprites?.

You can implement collision to work so that items bound off of each other as they scatter. Depending on the number of items, this might cause so much collision that the items don’t scatter well. If this happens, just run the collision detection one items have stopped moving.