Programming Snapshot – Game Development

The European soccer championship a year ago was quite a flop for Germany, with what used to be a World Cup-winning squad, but one scene from the Czech Republic's match against Scotland still sticks in my mind. The Scots goalkeeper had run far out of the goal, which Czech player Patrik Schick noticed while hovering at the halfway line. Schick quickly fired the ball into the out-of-bounds goalkeeper's goal with an eye-catching arcing shot. Since then, I've been trying to replicate this feat in my position as striker for the amateur team "Beer Fit" in San Francisco, though without any success so far. This is what prompted me to turn this into a video game written in Go for my Programming Snapshot column.

The underlying physics for the chip shot [1] in soccer is known as "projectile motion," and it's described in any good undergrad physics book. I happen to know this exactly because during my electrical engineering studies I sweated my way through many an exam in the murderous "Technical Mechanics" course. And even many, many years later, holding a totally yellowed degree certificate in my trembling hands, I only needed a short refresher to derive the formulas for the ball position as a function of the starting point, the angle and the velocity of the launch, and the elapsed time.

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