Algodoo

Close, but you are not quite there yet. The tracer moves a little bit each time you clear the trail. Put the tracer on the circle cake and then clear the trail and you will see what I mean.

Holy cow! You're right! When I increase the rotational speed, the spawned tracers are about 45 degrees off from the previous one! Back to the drawing board.

Thanks for catching this glitch for me. Quite often, an engineer doesn't see his/her own mistakes, and they need another set of eyes.

EDIT - I now use your calculation of the pos based on the tracer relPoint. That seems to be more accurate than spawning a new tracer using just its pos. I believe I know why that happened, but because I am so verbose, my explanation would require about four pages of text, and therefore I decided not to explain it!

You might be there, but I see a potential problem. You create the new tracer before deleting the old and both tracers have the clearTracer code in them. Algodoo deletes the old tracer first, but is this guaranteed to happen all the time? Also, if the circle's code is run in two consecutive sim periods, then the tracer is lost forever. If you move the circle's code from postStep to onHitByLaser, then you might see what I mean. Another way to see it is to set the sim speed to 0.01 and click "Clear Trail" repeatedly. This is not a problem for this particular scene, but it may cause problems when this concept is applied elsewhere.

Thanks for your critique of this scene. I appreciate it very much.

Because I use the "sceneCloneEntityTo" function, the old tracer cannot be deleted before the new one gets cloned (unlike your scheme where you spawn a completely new tracer with data that was collected from the old one).

I was not able to duplicate your findings by setting the sim speed at 0.01. I even tried setting the sim frequency to a very low value. The scene still worked flawlessly. I'm going to leave it as-is. Anyone who uses it in their own scenes will just have to remember that it was created by another user, and they will get what they paid for!

Be my guest if you would like to improve it or embellish it.

If you replace

Scene.my.clearTracer = true

with

scene.removeEntity(Scene.entityByID(_tracerEntityI­D))

then the problem (that you don't see but is really there) will go away.

P.S. An easy way to check it before and after the change is to place "scene.my.clearTrail = true" in the onHitByLaser event of the circle and then add a laser to the scene that is activated by a keypress.

Well, I tried your "fix" and it doesn't work. A new tracer gets cloned but the old one doesn't get deleted. Here is the new code in the circle:

scene.my.clearTrail ? {
scene.my.clearTrail = false;
_tracerPos := pos + _tracerRelPoint(0) * [math.cos(angle), math.sin(angle)] + _tracerRelPoint(1) * [-1.0 * math.sin(angle), math.cos(angle)];
Scene.cloneEntityTo(Scene.entityByID(_tracerEntity­ID), _tracerPos);
scene.removeEntity(Scene.entityByID(_tracerEntityI­D))
} : {}
and here is the code in the tracer:
g0 = entityByGeomID((readable(owner)).geom);
g0._tracerRelPoint = (readable(owner)).relPoint;
g0._tracerEntityID = entityID

What went wrong?

EDIT: I moved the geometry code from "postStep" to "update" and now it seems to work correctly.

Q: What went wrong?
A: I'm not sure. The code you stated above works OK for me when in the postStep event. The only thing I can think of is that when the removeEntity line of code is copied from the web page to postStep it does not copy correctly. If I copy the removeEntity line of code from the web page to Notepad, I can see that an additional character shows up.

P.S. I tried the laser test mentioned above on your scene and Algodoo crashes. Algodoo does not crash if the code is in the postStep event.

This scene is making me crazy. I moved the code back to postStep, and now it works just fine. I don't know what happened before, but it would not work, and that's when I tried moving it to update, which worked. But because you found that it crashes under certain conditions, I certainly don't want to leave it that way.

Thanks for all your help, Master Po.

Xray

Yes. Works well. I tried a variation that is interesting, but is not as easy to implement as yours.

In Circle postStep:

scene.my.clearTrail ? {
scene.my.clearTrail = false;
myTracer := (readable(scene.my.newTracer));
tracerPos := pos + myTracer.relPoint(0) * [math.cos(angle), math.sin(angle)] + myTracer.relPoint(1) * [-1.0 * math.sin(angle), math.cos(angle)];
tracerID := scene.my.newTracer.entityID;
cloneEntityTo(entityByID(tracerID), tracerPos);
removeEntity(entityByID(tracerID))
} : {}

in tracer onSpawn:

scene.my.newTracer = entity

The only problem with this is that scene.my.newTracer has to be initially set to the present tracer in order for the scene to start working. This can be done by saving and reopening the scene.

Your scene is better than this because it doesn't require an explanation.