# Javascript/html5 2d Canvas Context - Getting X, Y relative to canvas (opposed to transformed object)

I have scenario where there are several items on a the context stack and I need to get an x, y coordinate relative to the canvas itself.

The situation is I am writing a 2D game in HTML5 and I want the "character" being controlled by the user to be able to aim towards the mouse. The character is nested in transformations. There is a camera object that transforms the canvas to follow the character and perform zooms/rotations, and of course the character itself is transformed downwards, and at times rotated away from it's centre.

If I could get the position of my character relative to the canvas, I could do an atan2 to aim towards the mouse. Alternatively, if I could get the mouse coordinates relative to the centre of my character, then I could do the same.

Is there any way to do this other than to reverse all of my transform calculations?

Unfortunately I ended up manually reversing the transformations. The following code is what I put into the camera object:

/**
Transforms mousex and mousey to the positions within the game.
*/
this.transformMouse = function(mousex, mousey){
var xScale = screenWidth / (currentMaxX - currentMinX);
var yScale = screenHeight / (currentMaxY - currentMinY);

this.tmousex = (mousex - screenWidth / 2) / xScale + (currentMaxX + currentMinX) / 2;
this.tmousey = (mousey - screenHeight / 2) / yScale + (currentMaxY + currentMinY) / 2;
}


the tmousex and tmousey are the transformed x and y positions of the mouse. This does not account for rotation - the reversal of the transformation will have to go into the character code (rotation of camera and character will just be added after the atan2 code).

Hope this helps anyone with the same problem.

Well, I need more info about your game (basically where is the character situated). If the character is always in the center of the canvas you can use this:

window.addEventListener('mousemove', function(event) {
var x =event.clientX - canvas.width/2;
var y =event.clientY - canvas.height/2;
var ang = radToDeg(Math.atan2( y , x ));
ang = y<0 ? (-1)*ang:360 -ang;
self._player._orientation=ang;

},false);


Which is pretty self explanatory.

In the case that your player is not centered, then you need to use gluProject on the center of your character to convert that point from object coordinates (x,y,z) to screen coordinates (x,y).

• Thanks. The character is indeed not in the centre of the screen and will most likely be rotated by some amount. The rotation transformation will be easy since I can just add the stored rotation to the mouse's desired angle. So I'll look into the gluProject tonight and let you know how it goes. – JSideris Dec 15 '11 at 15:38
• Thanks for the help, but the derivation required to do the work manually was less work for me than getting set up with gluProject. – JSideris Dec 18 '11 at 20:57