Ok, so I have still been fiddling with a project for several months... I am just trying to have a cube. Despite my valiant (but still noobish) efforts, I have gotten no closer to my goal. I am familiar with the notion that ray casting involves calculating the distance in 3-dimensional shape to a point upon a 3-dimensional surface, but how would I do that?
Since I don't neccissarily want to paste in a novel, here is what I am doing in short:
I have a camera, that has location, and rotation (rotation changed in-game)
I have an "Object3d" class for my 3-dimensional Actors, that gives all objects their faces, vertices, and other important data
I have a ArrayListTools class that is being used to take an array of faces and attempts to sort them by their closeness to the camera. So far, the best thing I have that works (though it still doesn't really work) is this:
using this, it would determine if one face in a list is closer than another. It would then go about rearranging them using this method.
In general, I just need to know what I am doing wrong, and if there is a better way entirely to go about rendering the scene. Currently, the order of these simply determines the order in which they are painted. Is there a way I could do the good kind of raycast, that doesn't render what isn't seen?
public boolean RaycastCompare(Face face1, Face face2, Vertice Orign)
{
float distanceToFace1 = Math.abs(face1.getAverageX()) + Math.abs(face1.getAverageY()) + Math.abs(face1.getAverageZ());
float distanceToFace2 = Math.abs(face2.getAverageX()) + Math.abs(face2.getAverageY()) + Math.abs(face2.getAverageZ());
float totalCam = Math.abs(Orign.getX()) + Math.abs(Orign.getY()) + Math.abs(Orign.getZ());
distanceToFace1 -= totalCam;
distanceToFace2 -= totalCam;
if(distanceToFace1 <= distanceToFace2)
{
return true;
}
return false;
}public ArrayList SortByRaycast(ArrayList<Face> array,world3d world)
{
//RaycastCompare(face1, face2, Cam.position) //if face1 is closer than face2, return true
Camera Cam = world.getCam();
int i = 0;
while(i < array.size())
{
boolean shouldRepeat = true;
while(shouldRepeat)
{
if(i<array.size()-1)
{
if(!(RaycastCompare(array.get(i),array.get(i+1), Cam.getPosition())))
{
Face tempFace1 = array.get(i);
Face tempFace2 = array.get(i + 1);
array.set(i,tempFace2);
array.set(i+1,tempFace1);
}
else
{
shouldRepeat = false;
}
}
else
{
shouldRepeat = false;
}
}
i++;
}
return array;
}