Drawing at floating point position

Question

The library I am using (SDL2) only supports drawing to int positions. I am currently storing my objects positions as double, and would like to render them. Should I round the value to int, i.e. 0.5 => 1, or simply cast it to int, i.e. 0.5 => 0?

Answer 1

Maybe this answer will not suit your question, but I assume that you want to have float movement precision even when SDL rectangles support only integer values.

One of the tricks you can do is to have a float/double variables to track some kind of "virtual" position in your world. In your case it means having a struct SDL_Rect and some float vector. For example:

//Custom made generic type
Vector2<float> _position;

//SDL struct
SDL_Rect _rect;

void Object::init(float x, float y,SDL_texture* text)
{
    _position.x = x;
    _position.y = y;

    _rect.x = (int)x;
    _rect.y = (int)y;

    _texture = text;
}

And then the update function would look like this:

void Object::update(float deltaTime){

    _position.x += 5.0f * deltaTime;
    _position.y += 5.0f * deltaTime;

    _rect.x = (int)_position.x;
    _rect.y = (int)_position.y; 
}

That way you don't lose the movement precisions the floats have. Then you can use this position vector also for collision checks, where instead of checking SDL_Rects (in case of Rectangular collision) you check their position vectors+dimensions.

Answer 2

There's a simple way to render a rectangle with floating point coordinates but for some reason it's documentation is not available on the wiki. A commit was done to add this feature on October 22, 2018. Atleast SDL 2.0.10 required.

SDL_FRect box = {11.5, 1.2, 10.5, 11.252};
SDL_RenderFillRectF(renderer, &box);

^{A simple demonstration of how it can be used for rendering.}

Answer 3

SDL2 has full range of function equivalents for float types here back in 2023 and if you want smooth movement like position.x += (x*delta)/speed this functions are here to help:

Basically what I have used so far is:

SDL_FRect - Rectangle struct

SDL_RenderCopyExF - For advanced rendering

SDL_RenderCopyF - For simple rendering

This is additional functions I also use:

SDL_RenderDrawRectF - For drawing rectangle

SDL_RenderFillRectF - For filling rectangle

And I believe it is a deception but it feels like float type functions work faster (In fact they might be converting floats to integers I have never looked into a function sources)