Converting from Radians to Degrees

Question

I'm building a small Physics engine and I'm having trouble converting my Radian value to Degrees using atan, as I need an angle to output in Degrees only.

Firstly, I have an x and y value, and I need to find an angle using atan, so I divide y by x like so:

angleDivide = yN / xN;

Then, before putting this value into tan, I attempt to convert it to Degrees like this:

angleToDegrees = angleDivide * (3.14 / 180);

Then I place angleToDegrees into atan:

angle = atan(angleToDegrees);

But when I'm displaying angle, I'm, still getting radian values.

Please could you tell me what is wrong with my code and how to fix this?

Answer 1

You want to calculate radians=tan(y/x) first.

Then you can convert it to degrees:

radians = atan(y/x)
degrees = radians * (180.0/3.141592653589793238463)

See the reference here for atan:

On a side note, you also have to take into account what quadrant you are in to get the correct answer (since -y/x is the same number as y/-x)