Looking to the Future

Had a bit of a problem with the bounce on the trajectory projection.  First, there were infinite slopes getting in the works and gumming everything up.  An infinite slope is a vertical line, and vertical lines don’t cross the paddle plane, and when the trajectory projection doesn’t intersect the paddle plane, you end up with a Forward Intersection Point list with about three million points in it, as the ball is predicted to be happily bouncing up and down over and over and over until the end of RAM.  After that, I had a bug where I wasn’t using the last calculated bounce point as the seed for the next bounce point.  This led to an angular infinite loop, bouncing between points 1 and 2 forever.

But those are both gone, and what I have now is a real-life forward trajectory projection!  It’s really exciting, because it typically completely fails to predict where the ball is actually going to go until the last second!

Here’s some video of the current status.

Two Point Slope Calculation:  Two Point Trajectory Projection

Five Point Calculation:  Five Point Trajectory Projection

You can see that the five point average is less hyperactive, but it’s still not good enough.  Hopefully the endpoint averaging will solve that problem.

But that will have to wait.  This is where I’ll leave it for the night.  Not bad for starting with nothing this morning…  Four days remain.