Hey

I have an animation of two objects rotating in different circles at different speeds. I then have two possible directions in which to travel to and from each object (red & green line represent this).

What I am stuck with is how I work out which path is the correct path to travel on. To explain what is going on in the animation see this image:

In the above image the red path is the correct path, going from inner to outer orbit the travel direction on the red path is clockwise, given that the green path is bowing into a smaller orbit, it is not the correct path to take.

In the below image the objects are in different locations! In this situation the green path is correct going from inner to outer orbit the travel direction on the green path is anti-clockwise, given that the red path is bowing into a smaller orbit, it is not the correct path to take.

My animation is here showing the paths calculated at the same time to show two possible choices at any given time: http://jsfiddle.net/Kz32b/

How can I work out which line is best between red and green. When the set of rules are the path must not go below the smallest orbit.

Ah! You are correct here is the changes i added:

http://jsfiddle.net/FSYC5/

Slight follow up question for it if you see that link ^ notice there is a small margin of time when the orbit goes below the smaller orbit, is there any way I can correct that at all ?

Slight follow up question for it if you see that link ^ notice there is a small margin of time when the orbit goes below the smaller orbit, is there any way I can correct that at all ?

Your calculated path isn't always going to look good as just a choice between two circular segments with a fixed radius.

I doubt the path between orbits should be a circular segment, but I have no idea. I'd expect a good-looking path and a somewhat realistic path to not have any sharp angles transitioning into or out of an orbit.

Edit: I may not have put enough thought into this, and I've never used this HTML5 canvas thing before, but it seems like you might want to draw a quadratic curve.

I don't understand what you mean ?

I don't understand what you mean ?

I'm not sure how to respond. I hope someone else can write something in a way you understand. Maybe I missed something in your code? Are your connecting paths not how I described them?