I made this pong game which I intend to expand upon; however, sometimes when the ball and the paddle collide the do not unstick can you take a look and tell me what you think? the game was written in C++ and used the techniques from SAMS 24hr Game Programming. Contact me via ICQ to get the file

I had this problem in my first game (pong). It was caused because I detected a collision between the ball and the paddle and then simply reversed the direction of the ball along whatever axis... usually x. So it looked like this, in pseudocode:

if (Collision())
Ball.x = -Ball.x;

Now, stop and think about what happens if the ball went into the paddle because it updates every frame and you have no code to make it stop when it hits the paddle (it just reverses without making sure the ball isn''t inside the paddle). If the ball isn''t moving fast enough to escape the paddle before the next frame, it will once again register as a collion and the direction of the ball will be reversed -- right back to the way it was in the beginning. And if it couldn''t escape the first time, it won''t escape the second time either... it''ll just bounce back and forth frame by frame, never going anywhere, appearing to be stuck to the paddle Hope that helps.


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Yanroy@usa.com

one option I find helpful is to check if the place I WANT TO MOVE will cause a collision BEFORE I move. By doing this you avoid making the initial collision where you would get stuck but to the user it looks like they collided and moved on.