I'm writing a program to draw a three-dimensional cube (with a corner cut off) without using any 3D graphics APIs. The only API call I make is win32's SetPixel()
Everything is going great. I've drawn lines, faces, and even the entire cube. Then rotation came along.
Did you know?Explore Trending and Topic pages for more stories like this.
For some reason, when I rotate my cube, it begins to shrink. I became confused, then I realised something. Floating point numbers are truncated.
Here's some code that is fired everytime the user presses 'X' on the keyboard.
p is a Point object that I created. Here the Y value and the Z value of the Point are being set. The problem is everytime X is pressed, and this code is fired, a small amount of precision is lost. As a result, the cube shrinks.
I'm really completely stumped. I remember when studying assembler that floating point numbers can be truncated or rounded. I think rounding would solve my problem. Since 50% of the time the value would round up, and 50% of the time the value would round down.
Whereas with truncation values are always lost, and never gained.