Based on my experience writing many games that work great barring the occasional random physics engine explosion, I suspect that trigonometry is responsible for a significant proportion of glitches.
replyI think over the years I subconsciously learned to avoid trig because of the issues mentioned, but I do still fall back to angles, especially for things like camera rotation. I am curious how far the OP goes with this crusade in their production code.
You can definitely handle camera rotation via vector operations on rotation matrices.
replyYour response is well-grounded--trig is trouble. Angles are often fine, but many 3rd party library functions are not.
replyHave you ended up with a set of self-implemented tools that you reuse?
> I think this is missing the reason why these APIs are designed like this: because they're convenient and intuitive
replyAgreed. In my view, the method the author figured out is far from intuitive for the general population, including me.
I guess the point is: How often do we really need actual angles in the code? Probably only at the very ends: input from users and output to users. Everywhere else, we should just be treating them as sin/cos pairs or dot/cross pairs. So when the user inputs an angle, immediately convert it to what the computer actually needs, store it that way throughout the computation, and then only if/when the user needs to see an actual angle would you need to convert it back.
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