[OT]Circle rant

[LuaWeaver]

A circle is not techniclly possible... it is just a regular polygon on a 2d plane with points connected by segments. A shape with 1,000,000 sides appears to be a circle, but is not. Same with "circles". The segments are invisible to the human eye. Any thoughts?

[TechnoCat]

A circle is not techniclly possible... it is just a regular polygon on a 2d plane with points connected by segments. A shape with 1,000,000 sides appears to be a circle, but is not. Same with "circles". The segments are invisible to the human eye. Any thoughts?

r(θ) = 1

[bmelts]

A distinction has to be drawn (heh) between a visual circle and a conceptual circle. Sure, in practice you can't draw an actual circle - if you zoom in far enough you can see that it's actually made up of a whole bunch of tiny tiny segments. But the mathematical equation for a circle exists (TechnoCat posted it) and is completely legitimate. Our ability to render it may be tragically limited by the discrete nature of things, but that doesn't mean a circle is impossible. It just means drawing one is.

[kikito]

A circle is not techniclly possible... it is just a regular polygon on a 2d plane with points connected by segments. A shape with 1,000,000 sides appears to be a circle, but is not. Same with "circles". The segments are invisible to the human eye. Any thoughts?

Where do you draw the line? (pun intended ).

Even if the circle was internally represented as a "circle equation" and not as a "polygon", when you draw it on the screen it gets translated into a bunch of pixels. One could say "That is instead not a real circle! It's just a bunch of colored pixels!"

One of the first questions I had when I entered these forums was very similar to yours: "How many segments should I use in love.graphics.circle, to make a realistic-looking circle without wasting resources?" . The answer was 3*r, if you are curious.

[tentus]

One could say "That is instead not a real circle! It's just a bunch of colored pixels!"

This is not a pipe?

[Kadoba]

Lots of things in computers are approximated. Floating point numbers are often inaccurate and random numbers aren't really random. Computing is built on the foundation of "good enough".

[Robin]

One of the first questions I had when I entered these forums was very similar to yours: "How many segments should I use in love.graphics.circle, to make a realistic-looking circle without wasting resources?" . The answer was 3*r, if you are curious.

I tend to use a logarithmic scale for that, which seems to work absolutely fine. On the other hand, that might mean that I draw too many segments for really small circles.