Chapter 11: Billiard Ball Physics

Overview

What well cover in this chapter:

  • Mass

  • Momentum

  • Conservation of momentum

  • Important formulas in this chapter

As you might expect in a technical book like this, things start off simple and gradually become more complex. With this chapter, you reach a pinnacle of complexity. Not that the rest of the chapters after this are all downhill, but I think this one in particular requires that you have not skimped on the material that came earlier. That said, Ill walk you through the concepts step by step, and if youve followed along reasonably well up to now, you should be fine.

Specifically, this chapter will focus on momentum: What happens to the momentum of two objects that collide, the conservation of momentum, and how to apply this conservation of momentum in ActionScript to movie clips.

As the objects used in these examples are all round, for simplicitys sake, this subject is often referred to as billiard ball physics. And youll soon see that these examples really do look like a bunch of different- sized billiard balls hitting each other.

As in previous chapters, when I get to the code, Ill start you out on one dimension to keep things simpler and easier to understand. Then Ill move into two dimensions, at which point youll need to jump into some coordinate rotation (the subject of the previous chapter). Essentially, youll be rotating the two-dimensional scene so it lies flat. You can then ignore one axis and treat it as a one-dimensional scene. But all that is just to whet your appetite for whats coming up. Lets start with the simple concepts of mass and momentum.



Foundation ActionScript. Animation. Making Things Move
Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!
ISBN: 1590597915
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 137
Authors: Keith Peters

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