How to shoot on direction of touch

Question

I'm new to the Corona SDK(and I also suck in trigonometry) and I'm trying to achieve this:

Shoot a bullet from the player, towards the direction of the point the user touched, but always with ethe same speed, regardless of how far the touch was from the player.

I have tried several solutions. After some research I saw that I should calculate the angle from the two deltas in degrees, and then use the cos and sin of the angle as the x and y values respectively. But when I try to do so, I get pretty random results.

The closer I was able to get from what I want to achieve was to use the delta variables as the X and Y (multiplied by the speed factor). It worked, but then the speed varied based on how far from the player I touched and I want the speed to be fixed.

Here's my latest code(using sin and cos)

local math, physics = require("math"), require('physics')

physics.start()
physics.setGravity( 0, 0 )

display.setStatusBar( display.HiddenStatusBar )

local screenW, screenH = display.contentWidth, display.contentHeight
local playerX, playerY = (screenW / 2), (screenH / 2)

local player = display.newRect( 0, 0, 30, 30 )
player.x = playerX
player.y = playerY

-- local sinT = display.newText("", 100, 10)
-- local cosT = display.newText("", 100, 30)
local angleT = display.newText("", 100, 70)

local function onScreenTouch( event )
  if (event.phase == "began") then
    speed = 3
    deltaX = event.x - playerX
    deltaY = event.y - playerY

    angle = math.atan2( deltaY, deltaX ) * 180 / math.pi

    -- sin, cos = math.sin( angle ), math.cos( angle )

    -- sinT.text = sin
    -- cosT.text = cos
    angleT.text = angle

    bullet = display.newRect( 0, 0, 6, 6 )
    bullet.x = playerX
    bullet.y = playerY

    physics.addBody( bullet )

    bullet:setLinearVelocity( math.cos( angle ) * speed, math.sin( angle ) * speed )
  end
end

Runtime:addEventListener( "touch", onScreenTouch )

Answer 1

Basically you will want to do something like this:

deltaX = event.x - playerX
deltaY = event.y - playerY
normDeltaX = deltaX / math.sqrt(math.pow(deltaX,2) + math.pow(deltaY,2))
normDeltaY = deltaY / math.sqrt(math.pow(deltaX,2) + math.pow(deltaY,2))

... 
bullet:setLinearVelocity( normDeltaX  * speed, normDeltaY  * speed )