As I am not a trigonometry major and probably younger than a lot of you, I haven't the foggiest idea what all this crazy arcsine junk is, and RADIANS... well lets not even go there.
Point is, I hope you give the option to use radians. Some of the less in-the-know people would much prefer to use degrees.
Um, we will be able to use either radians or degrees based on preferance, right? I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around why we have radians, let alone how they'd be more useful than degrees.
I think radians are good for lazy people if you like working with even divisions of 360 and don't want to do some quick mental math. i.e. "Hm, I don't know what 360/46 is, so I'll just make my angle increments equal to pi/23".
I'd like the option, but I like sticking with degrees. What would it default to, NC?
I do think it would be good to have the option for using either for the trig functions/angle/etc.
As far as a default, it seems most people want degrees as the default, it seems that most people want degrees. The plan is to have a command to switch it, which will be remembered for each object (so set it once in
initialize and you're good to go).
Let it default to degrees, and have a simple function switch it to radians for the rest of the script. In the rare event that someone wants to use both degrees and radians for something, it would also be nice to have a conversion function, like "let InRadians = Radian(x);" and "let InDegrees = Degree(x);".
... something like that. Not sure of the necessity of the conversion functions; it's a rather simple math:
radians = pi * degrees / 180;
degrees = 180 * radians / pi;
On a related thought - does anyone see any usefulness in having a function that returns whether radians or degrees is currently selected?
All of the internal math functions use radians normally, by the way. The code will automatically convert the angles if you have degrees selected.
Fffff
So how would you make a shot circle with radians if a circle can't be broken into an even number of them? 360 can be neatly divided so many ways!
Hint - angles don't need to be integers
Coming from someone who knows nothing: 2pi rad is 360 degrees, so 2pi/10 rad or pi/5 rad is 36 degrees, for example.
Thus, in Danmakufu:
ascent(i in 0..num)
{
CreateShot01(GetX, GetY, 2, rad(2*pi/num)*i, RED01, 10);
}
If we assume rad(x) makes the program read x as radians, or something.
I bet I'm totally wrong, since I really don't see the advantage over using radians when you can just divide in 360 instead of 2pi. Maybe I'm missing the point because I know nothing about the subject? Also, it doesn't NEED to be broken into an 'even number of them'. You can still divide a ring into 31 bullets in Danmakufu, despite 31 not being a factor of 360.
Your math looks good.
Radians vs degrees is a really academic argument at best. Only real advantage either way is that, with radians, an arc of
x radians on a unit circle has length of
x. That and radians involve pi. Seriously, how can you go wrong with
pi?
Family stuff eating my early weekend time, so no update tonight. Did give a bit of thought to the details on the implementation of arrays in the execution engine, though. Hopefully that counts for something.
