Cocos2d-iPhone Sprite Rotation to an Arbitrary Point

I had some time during the Thanksgiving weekend to work on Dungeonators. I’m hoping to get an upgrade out to the App Store soon. One thing I needed //TODO: is refactor my rather poor implementation of rotating a sprite to face another sprite. My original code worked ok, in a roundabout way, but was ugly and mysterious.

(My iPhone game is full of ugly mysterious code: As I implement my ideas in code I first focus on getting it to work. Then, if I have time I go back and fix it to work cleanly. Generally cleanly means boiling the code down to the fewest number of lines possible, making it as functional as possible, and using functions from the operating system or open source code libraries as much as possible.)

I won’t show you my original sprite rotation implementation. Some things are too gross even for the Internet. Let’s just say it was written as if I was trying to remember high school trigonometry by trial and error.

Instead below is the final implementation, useful to any Cocos2d-iPhone programmer who wants a sprite to rotate to face an opponent at any point on the screen:

- (void) rotateSourceSprite:(CCSprite *)sourceSprite toFaceTargetSprite:(CCSprite *)targetSprite {

    // Calculation
    CGPoint difference = ccpSub(sourceSprite.position, targetSprite.position);
    CGFloat rotationRadians = ccpToAngle(difference);
    CGFloat rotationDegrees = -CC_RADIANS_TO_DEGREES(rotationRadians);
    rotationDegrees += 90.0f;
    CGFloat rotateByDegrees = rotationDegrees - sourceSprite.rotation;

    // animation
    CCRotateBy * turnBy = [CCRotateBy actionWithDuration:0.5f angle:rotateByDegrees];
    CCEaseIn * ease = [CCEaseIn actionWithAction:turnBy rate:4];
    [sourceSprite runAction:ease];
}

And here’s how it works, just incase you’re curious…

• The method takes a source sprite and as target sprite as parameters. After it runs it will rotate the source to face the target.
• The calculation part uses Cocos2d helper functions and macros (ccpSub, ccpToAngle, and CC_RADIANS_DEGREES) to figure the maths. In my original implementation I had written my own versions. Using the Cocos2d API makes my code easier to read and perhaps faster.
• The maths work like this: Create a vector out of the distance between to points. Convert the vector to an angle. Convert the angle from radians to degrees and negate it*. Add 90 degrees to the angle to get the proper orientation. (The +=90.0f value is game specific: My sprites are rotated 90 degrees to start with.) Subtract the penultimate result of the calculation from the current rotation property (angle) of the source sprite to get the final result (the amount to rotate by).
• The animation, which could easily be factored out into a method of its own, uses Cocos2d’s CCRotateBy and CCEaseIn to turn the source sprite to face the target in half a second. This part didn’t change from the original code. I didn’t factor it out because in my game I always use these two pieces together. I don’t like to do too much work in the abstract because I usually end up making my code too complex.

* The need to negate the value produced by CC_RADIANS_DEGREES is a bit of a mystery to me. If I don’t do it my sprite ends up facing in the opposite direction.