"Touches" Function

[Optimistic Peach]

Hi there, I created a function for me to use in sfml that checks whether or not something is in the radius of another thing. Here is the function:

    float Dist(Vector2f a, Vector2f b) {
	float xDist = (b.x - a.x) * (b.x - a.x);
	float yDist = (b.y - a.y) * (b.y - a.y);
	float Dist = sqrtf(xDist + yDist);
	return Dist;
    }
    bool Touches(Vector2f a, float aR, Vector2f b, float bR) {
	float dist = Dist(a, b);
	return dist < aR + bR;
    }

Sorry for any basic mistakes I've made, I'm quite new to C++.
Do you see any errors in the functions, because when I use them in practice they don't work as expected.

In other words, is it a problem with some other code or with this code?

[dhayden]

That looks okay to me.

As written, the code passes the Vector2f parameters by value, which means it makes a copy of them. If would be more efficient to pass them by constant reference:

    float Dist(const Vector2f &a, const Vector2f &b) {
	float xDist = (b.x - a.x) * (b.x - a.x);
	float yDist = (b.y - a.y) * (b.y - a.y);
	float Dist = sqrtf(xDist + yDist);
	return Dist;
    }
    bool Touches(const Vector2f &a, float aR, const Vector2f &b, float bR) {
	float dist = Dist(a, b);
	return dist < aR + bR;
    }

Also, if performance is an issue, you could compute the square of the distance in Touches and see if that's less than the square of the sum of the radii.

[Optimistic Peach]

Alright, thanks dhayden, I'll keep looking for an error elsewhere in my code.