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Timeline for "fastest" curve through n points

Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0

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Nov 25, 2018 at 16:10 comment added Josef Zoller @Rahul thanks for these links, I think I can get a solution with them
Nov 25, 2018 at 15:56 comment added user856 (reposting my comment because I wanted to edit a link) @Josef: What Ethan proposes is a very interesting mathematics problem, but for the purposes of programming curves in a game I believe a Catmull-Rom spline should be sufficient, perhaps with centripetal parametrization, which would give "good enough" looking curves.
Nov 25, 2018 at 15:26 comment added Ethan Bolker @Rahul What lovely links - particularly the second one. I hope the OP appreciates them.
Nov 25, 2018 at 15:12 comment added Ethan Bolker I think the official name for the area your problem lives in is :"calculus of variations". I doubt that there's a neat solution, but you can post it and hope.
Nov 25, 2018 at 15:08 comment added Josef Zoller Thanks for explaining to me the downvotes. I'll try to improve my question
Nov 25, 2018 at 15:05 comment added Ethan Bolker @JosefZoller That clarifies a lot. You have indeed asked an x-y question: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem . I think the real question is finding the fastest track, given the physical characteristics of the car - how fast can it accelerate or decelerate, how fast can it take turns. That's a hard problem. Programmng a bezier curve might give you a good enough answer. You could post it here in much more detail and hope for help.
Nov 25, 2018 at 14:57 comment added Josef Zoller I'm programming an AI for a race game through a couple of checkpoints. If my car goes straight in direction of the checkpoint, then it has to slow down and make a huge turn there, so I wanted it to drive on such a curve, which I tried to explain (It seems, that my explanation was very bad)
Nov 25, 2018 at 14:52 history answered Ethan Bolker CC BY-SA 4.0