I was wondering how to calculate a car to drive to a certain position in space.

While a tank or a person can turn around their own axis a standard car cannot, it needs to turn around until it is facing the destination point in space and then start driving into it's direction.

My first thought was calculating the angle between the desired direction and the current direction of the car every cycle

and let the car turn step by step until delta angle is zero.

However I think this might be overkill to do for lots of cars in my Android racing game.

I always try to avoid sin and cos because I was told they are very expensive to compute on CPU and I wanted to ask if there is a better faster easier way to calculate this?

Or if this is a good way to go.

Thanks

Best Regards

Use a fixed number of directions, for explaining, assume 4 (N/E/S/W), but in reality you'd use 16 24 or even more.

Every turn/tick, a car may rotate one direction N -> E for example, or N -> W, but not N -> S. It may also drive forward in that direction. The limited amount of rotation gives a turning circle, lower speed gives turns closer to each other, so you can turn "faster".

Since directions are fixed, you can pre-compute angles.

There is an article on gamasutra, Towards More Realistic Pathfinding, that has a method for doing this. I'm not sure how many cars you have, but you might use that. Though honestly, for a racing game, you might want to look around for a different approach, most use more of a reactionary approach over pathfinding.

Also, as a sidenote, most tanks can't actually turn in place, they can get pretty tight turning radiuses though.

I also don't think it's all that expensive, even on android phones, to call sin/cos. I've done windows phone development (Which often have same hardware), and done some fairly expensive calculations every frame, and still had a rock solid 60 fps.