I am currently developing a breakout clone and I have hit a roadblock in getting collision detection between a ball (circle) and a brick (convex polygon) working correctly. I am using a Circle-Line collision detection test where each line represents and edge on the convex polygon brick. For the majority of the time the Circle-Line test works properly and the points of collision are resolved correctly. Collision detection working correctly. However, occasionally my collision detection code returns false due to a negative discriminant when the ball is actually intersecting the brick. Collision detection failing. I am aware of the inefficiency with this method and I am using axis aligned bounding boxes to cut down on the number of bricks tested. My main concern is if there are any mathematical bugs in my code below. /* * from and to are points at the start and end of the convex polygons edge. * This function is called for every edge in the convex polygon until a * collision is detected. */ bool circleLineCollision(Vec2f from, Vec2f to) { Vec2f lFrom, lTo, lLine; Vec2f line, normal; Vec2f intersectPt1, intersectPt2; float a, b, c, disc, sqrt_disc, u, v, nn, vn; bool one = false, two = false; // set line vectors lFrom = from - ball.circle.centre; // localised lTo = to - ball.circle.centre; // localised lLine = lFrom - lTo; // localised line = from - to; // calculate a, b & c values a = lLine.dot(lLine); b = 2 * (lLine.dot(lFrom)); c = (lFrom.dot(lFrom)) - (ball.circle.radius * ball.circle.radius); // discriminant disc = (b * b) - (4 * a * c); if (disc < 0.0f) { // no intersections return false; } else if (disc == 0.0f) { // one intersection u = -b / (2 * a); intersectPt1 = from + (lLine.scale(u)); one = pointOnLine(intersectPt1, from, to); if (!one) return false; return true; } else { // two intersections sqrt_disc = sqrt(disc); u = (-b + sqrt_disc) / (2 * a); v = (-b - sqrt_disc) / (2 * a); intersectPt1 = from + (lLine.scale(u)); intersectPt2 = from + (lLine.scale(v)); one = pointOnLine(intersectPt1, from, to); two = pointOnLine(intersectPt2, from, to); if (!one && !two) return false; return true; } } bool pointOnLine(Vec2f p, Vec2f from, Vec2f to) { if (p.x >= min(from.x, to.x) && p.x <= max(from.x, to.x) && p.y >= min(from.y, to.y) && p.y <= max(from.y, to.y)) return true; return false; }