Hi AB,
Sorry to hear about your power situation.
Using the physics engine, it controls the collisions and corresponding bounces. If you just move an object (paddle) then the engine will sometimes miss the collision or handle it badly, since the engine was not in control of the movement - you effectively disregarded the physics in the engine and teleported the paddle, possibly on top of a moving ball that finds itself inside the paddle and connot rebound according to its physics.
For this reason we interact with moving objects by applying impulses and torques rather than setting their position and rotation.
If an object is heavy (dense) than it will rebound less than light objects hitting it - we can use this to for example prevent dynamic paddles from moving much when hit by a light ball.
There are also joint constraints that can be set to constrain the movement of dynamic objects.
Unfortunately, these approaches are not 'simple'.
In reality, the simplest approach is to program the paddle ball interactions (bounces) directly without the physics engine, since the geometry is very simple and a bounce of a ball on vertical or horizontal surface just flips the sign of one component of the velocity (X or Y).
If you want to go the physics engine route, we will be talking about impulses, momentum changes and physics engine constraints. See samples Example13 and Example13A as a starting point.
If you want to go the (probably easier for this case) bouncing ball approach, then consider this example (SFRT178.000) which is quite old but still shows ball baddle bouncing - I think there are also simple 'breakout' type samples.
In either case, I can help, but as you say you will do most the work.
Sorry to hear about your power situation.
Using the physics engine, it controls the collisions and corresponding bounces. If you just move an object (paddle) then the engine will sometimes miss the collision or handle it badly, since the engine was not in control of the movement - you effectively disregarded the physics in the engine and teleported the paddle, possibly on top of a moving ball that finds itself inside the paddle and connot rebound according to its physics.
For this reason we interact with moving objects by applying impulses and torques rather than setting their position and rotation.
If an object is heavy (dense) than it will rebound less than light objects hitting it - we can use this to for example prevent dynamic paddles from moving much when hit by a light ball.
There are also joint constraints that can be set to constrain the movement of dynamic objects.
Unfortunately, these approaches are not 'simple'.
In reality, the simplest approach is to program the paddle ball interactions (bounces) directly without the physics engine, since the geometry is very simple and a bounce of a ball on vertical or horizontal surface just flips the sign of one component of the velocity (X or Y).
If you want to go the physics engine route, we will be talking about impulses, momentum changes and physics engine constraints. See samples Example13 and Example13A as a starting point.
If you want to go the (probably easier for this case) bouncing ball approach, then consider this example (SFRT178.000) which is quite old but still shows ball baddle bouncing - I think there are also simple 'breakout' type samples.
In either case, I can help, but as you say you will do most the work.
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