How do these functions work?

Object function "Object's Quaternion" returns 4 coordinates (w,x,y,z).
Can someone please explain to me what those coordinates represent?

Also, a world function under the "other" category has 3 parameters, right, up and forward. How do those work?

Originally Posted by Rick Prins

Object function "Object's Quaternion" returns 4 coordinates (w,x,y,z).
Can someone please explain to me what those coordinates represent?

Also, a world function under the "other" category has 3 parameters, right, up and forward. How do those work?

Can't help you much with Quaternion. I do know that they are heavily used by game programmers. I believe that they somehow combine coordinate information with orientation information. Apparently they provide computational efficiencies for certain operations. Even if you get a Quaternion in Alice, I don't believe there is much support for doing anything with it.

However, right, up, and forward are simply Alice-speak for the normal X, Y, and Z coordinates of a 3D world. Apparently the Alice development team believed that right, up, and forward would be somewhat less mentally challenging than X, Y, and Z for beginning programming students.

Dick Baldwin
Free Alice tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
Free programming tutorials: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/toc.htm

For more on quaternions see the thread:
http://www.alice.org/community/showt...highlight=roll

As I understand it, they simplify the matrix manipulations required to do 3D math, especially if it is heavy in rotations, thus the popularity with game programmers. Doubt if a non-specialist would have much use for them - just a good basic matirx manipulation package should be adequate.

They are part of the CMU math pack - but, as Dick noted - I don't think there is any way to directly access that from the current version of Alice.