And it has been up to now. Simple, but tedious. On wall collisions, the player object was literally checking to see which wall object it was hitting and then acting accordingly. This involved putting "left" walls on the left of the room, "bottom" wall on the bottom of the room and so on.
It was not, how you say in America, a general solution.
Well, for a round object like a shield, this is obviously not going to work, so I had to come up with something else. And I did:
//get the center of the object I just collided with
px =other.x
py =other.y
//get the difference in position between my center and that of the object
tx = x - px;
ty = y - py;
//get the sign of that difference
sx = sign(tx);
sy = sign(ty);
//get the X to Y ratio of the line between the two points
//in absolute terms
ar = abs(tx/ty);
at = abs(ty/tx);
//assign a new location "15" ish pixels from the collision in the opposite direction
x += sx * (min(15, 15 * ar))
y += sy * (min(15, 15 * at));
//YAY, no trigenometry
When the player collides with an object now, I run the above and it bounces 15 or so (will tweak it later) pixels in the opposite direction. I could probably get it down to like 4 lines of code, but this is actually readable.
Next, I created a single collidable wall object (instead of four) and surrounded the room with it:
