Hi all,

I have been working on a project in which I am harvesting questions people type into Google. A cronjob collects the results from Google's "suggest" list into several XML files.

The current state of the project is here: http://www.oracloud.net
Here is the full code: http://www.oracloud.net/sketch12.pde

The problem I'm having is with the words bouncing off one another. I have tried just about everything and this is the best result I could get. But I'd really like to eliminate the issue where some of the words get "caught" and sort of jitter near the mouse until I move the mouse to release them. I want it to be possible to hover over one word, while other words get pushed away. When the mouse is still and not hovering over a word, I want to make sure words heading that direction don't get caught. For the most part, this is happening.

Here is the conditional that is essentially causing words to bounce back when the mouse is still.

Code:

if (dist(posX[i]+(qWidth/2), posY[i]-(fontsize/2), mouseX, mouseY) < (qWidth/2+25) && abs(mouseX-pmouseX) < 1 && abs(mouseY-pmouseY) < 1) {
	    dirX[i] *= -1;
	    dirY[i] *= -1;
	  } 

The main problem is that this is all within a loop that alters each position (posX, posY) array (one per shape). Before I was setting a boolean called hover to true upon hover, and this would cause any subsequently drawn words to bounce back, but then at the end of draw() hover had to be reset to false (so it will be false when a user is not hovering).

I know this is fairly complex territory as it requires understanding my entire program, but if anyone has suggestions how I can improve this mechanism they would be greatly appreciated.

Ok, I restructured the program so that they objects are in arrays, and the hover check and mouseOver event functions are now seperated from the main drawShape() function. Now the problem is if I'm hovering over the object shapeState1[0] and shapeState1[1] moves where my mouse is, it switches the mouseOver state to the higher object. I actually had achieved the same thing before, but this is also less than ideal.

Did you have something different in mind?

Code:

// check hover
	for(int i = 7; i >= 0; i--) {
	  int whichHover = shapeState1[i].hover(100);
	  if (whichHover < 100) {
	    shapeState1[i].mouseOver(whichHover);
	    break;
	  }
	}
	
	// generate shapes/question
	// float in: scale (irrelevant), positionX, positionY, small or no?, opacity
	for(int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
	  shapeState1[i].drawShape(0, 0, 0, false, opacity[i]);
	} 

http://oracloud.net/sketch13.pde
http://oracloud.net/

PS. Thanks! It didn't render in Firefox before -- I don't know if that's why you couldn't view online, but that's fixed now.

Actually, I found a different solution. Basically it looks for whether the term has changed directions twice consecutively, then changes the direction back so it never jitters. I hadn't thought of each term being a seperate object. Basically I have one object that draws an entire shape. I see how something like that could work too, though, but I'm happy with this solution. Thanks for the help!