Im not sure how to use vectors correctly in game programming. I have been reading advanced game design with flash which shows you how to create a vector with a start point and endpoint and how to use that for games, for example the start point would be used for a characters position in a game and the x and y length would be used for velocity. But since I have started looking online I have found that vectors are usually just x and y with no start point or end point and a character would be moved by having a position vector and a velocity vector and acceleration vector. I have started creating my own vector class. And wondered what the reasons for and against each method are. Or is it completely not important?
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Initially a vector means direction. Classical vector is used in physics to present a velocity so that the vector direction stands for the heading and the vector length is a speed.But in graphics vectors are used also to present position. So if you have some point, let’s say, in 2d space noted by x ,y it remains point if you don’t want to know in what direction it set relating to the origin which is usually a center of the coordinate system. In 2d graphics we deal with Cartesian coordinate system which has an origin in top left corner of the screen. But you can also have a direction of some vector relative to any other point in the space.That is why you have also vector operations like addition, subtracting ,dot product, cross product. All those help you to measure distances and angles between vectors. I would suggest you to buy a book on graphics programming. Most of them introduce an easy to grasp primer to vector math.And you don’t need to write a vector class in AS 3.0 You have a generic one – Vector3d