Bouncing a ball off a surface

Posted by Sagekilla on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Sagekilla
Published on 2010-05-16T18:55:47Z Indexed on 2010/05/16 19:00 UTC
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Hi all, I'm currently in the middle of writing a game like Breakout, and I was wondering how I could properly bounce a ball off a surface.

I went with the naive way of rotating the velocity by 180 degrees, which was:

[vx, vy] -> [-vy, vx]

Which (unsurprisingly) didn't work so well. If I know the position and veocity of the ball, as well as the point the ball would hit (but is going to instead bounce off of) how can I bounce it off that point?

I don't need any language specific code. If anyone could provide a small, mathematical formula on how to properly do this that would work fine for me. I also need this to work with integer positions and velocity (I can't use floating point anywhere).

Thanks!

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