Re: FLASH: anyone written an arctangent function for flash?

[andy]

Matt wrote:

>>Maybe I'm naive, but wouldn't it be better to use the

>>loadvariable capabilities to run a perl, PHP or ASP

>>script which has the functions built in?

>

>To answer your question, yes. Having an external scripting language with a

>built-in math object would be more accurate and make more sense. However,

>there are times where it would certainly be, um, nice to have an arctan

>function in Flash.

>

>I'm sure there are better ways to do arctan in Flash 4 - don't ask me to

>write one, I don't know how - so I'm sure the group can answer that. This

>was just one sample.


FWIW, I wrote a sine/cosine function that pre-calculates values from 0 to 2*pi in frame 1 and writes them into an array.  Then I use a Call to access the values when I need them, which I assume saves CPU time because Flash doesn't need to crunch thru that godawful Taylor calculation each time.  This has the advantage of being small, quick, & doesn't require an extra data download from the perl/PHP server.  I was going to do tan/arctan next, thanks for providing the formula Matt!  I can only hope that Flash5 will have trig functions (as well as simple stuff like an abs() function) built-in...


Happy flashing,


Andy

kalinidiom [dot] com

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