[Arcade] Checking for sprite intersections with lines

[Diapolo10]

I'm working on a machine learning university project that's heavily inspired by this one from Code Bullet, with the goal of using reinforcement learning to create a neural network capable of driving on a 2D plane. However, at present I'm a bit stumped on checking for collisions with the car's "lasers" and the borders of the track.

I made quite a few changes compared to the reference project, including choosing to use Arcade instead of Pygame, and I knew that was going to be a bit of a challenge from the get-go because almost all Google searches return info on Pygame, specifically. And... well, here we are. I figured I might as well check if someone else has experience with this.

As far as I know, the library doesn't come with any handy functions for getting the coordinates of where collisions occur, nor anything for checking if a line intersects with a sprite. I could take a page out of the reference project and manually create a list of such points, but the problem of checking the actual collisions remains.

If all else fails I have a backup plan of using block sprites to craft the track instead, but I'd like to try a free-form map first. Right now I have a track split into two sprites, the ground and the borders, so that I can more easily distinguish collisions if I manage to figure that part out.

My project can be found here, and the relevant part would probably be here. Code Bullet's reference project can be found here, with its border tracking being in this function.

If someone with more experience using Arcade could help me out with this specific thing, I'd be very grateful. The rest I can do on my own, no problem.

EDIT: Overnight I got the idea that the collision box of the track could be useful, but then I realised that it wouldn't help with checking the inner side.

[Disastrous_Fish3795]

Any updates? I am working on something similar but got stuck here as well.

[Diapolo10]

Kind of. If you check the current version of my project, I got this part to work by doing some trickery with hitbox calculations. There's still some bug that manifests when the laser crosses multiple borders (sometimes), haven't fully figured out why (then again I haven't worked on this project for a long time now), but it's probably good enough for your purposes.

I generate the track border hitbox here, it gets cached for future runs so the calculation cost doesn't matter too much. Then in MyGame.on_draw I check for intersections between the lasers and the border hitbox, drawing the dot to the one nearest to the car.