Profile Pong Game Development

[SMcNeill]

Pinball is fine idea to play with but not what this thread is about.

As ball approaches paddle, maybe could show a tangent line (angled flat paddle) if contact made with ball and paddle at ball height to circle?
Picking up on what Steve said. That might be interesting to this side view game of Ping Pong. The paddle automatically changes angle according to height of paddle and ball centers. hmm... crazy trig and geometry challenge!

It's really not that complex math.  The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.  

Hit a flat wall at 45 degrees, then you have a 45 degree reflection.   



Now, if you have a slanted wall, you just subtract angles.   For example, let's use a 45 degree wall... if you draw it on a sheet of paper, that wall will look like / <-- that slash almost. To make it a "flat line" like the picture above, just rotate your sheet of paper 45 degrees. / now becomes __. Of course, since you rotated the whole page 45 degrees, if you measure your angle of incidence, it's now rotated that same 45 degrees... So at the end, that's basically all you do -- subtract the angle of rotatation from the angle of incidence to get the angle of reflection.

(That is, if my brain is working well enough to explain it properly, at 5:30 in the morning, before my first cup of coffee in the day has even finished brewing.)