What exactly is a radian?

programming flash
1

I’m not to well versed in algebra (too young), and the definition on dictionary.com didn’t seem to help a whole lot. Basically, all I got from that was that a radian is the radius of a circle, except you basically just add a degree sign to it.
Now that doesn’t exactly sound right to me, plus I think that when people use it for flash they use it as a unit of measurement… I am trying to make some bubbles float up on something(randomly via actionscript, not animations), and I have succeeded except for the fact that they seem to be jiggly, I am quite sure this is due to the fact that I adjust the _x property of the bubble via a random number, which most of the time goes back and forth…
So I’ve been trying to stop it from jiggling, and I had an idea to search for a snow tutorial, and I wound up here! I could quite easily just rip the code off the site, but that doesn’t satisfy me, I would be greatly appreciative if I could actually understand the code instead of just copy+pasting.
Thank you for any help.

2

I won’t go into the whole idea behind the radians, to keep is short. :wink:

You know that 360 degrees is a full circle? Well, a full circle in radians is 2pi (as in 2 * Math.PI). That’s it!

Easy as pie, eh? :stuck_out_tongue:

comparison:

360 degrees == 2pi
180 degrees == 1pi
90 degrees == .5pi
…
(Well, you get the point)

3

in shorter short, its just another form of measurement for angles and things of the such, just like centimeters to inches or celcius to temperature degrees. Radians are the measurements used in trig stuff like sine and cosine as opposed to degrees. Afterall, it would be too logical to use degrees :crazy:.

4

Ahh thank you very much, so one degree = (PI*2)/360… thank you very much!

5

hey babywax, just a quick little something. For your footer, it you want it to stop when they stop holding the mouse, add an onDragOut handler as well. Try dragging off your footer and the spray goes forever. Just a little note. :wink:

6

and it’s too big =)

7

*Originally posted by senocular *
**in shorter short, its just another form of measurement for angles and things of the such, just like centimeters to inches or celcius to temperature degrees. Radians are the measurements used in trig stuff like sine and cosine as opposed to degrees. Afterall, it would be too logical to use degrees :crazy:. **
My sientific mind prefers radians over degrees, because people actually gave it some thought and therefore is (more) logical.

But the other part of my brain (about 90% of it) iis too lazy to think in pi’s, so I’ll go with degrees too.

8

here’s a nice descript with diagram::

9

Thanks, that last one helped a lot too.
P.S.
Pertaining to my footer, for some reason I can’t adjust the height? It has the correct width but for some reason it doesn’t appear to change it’s height down to 60… I made it 60 in flash MX and published it and copied the html but no go… Argh!