"With America going into Winter and Pokemon being hard to find, I've made a free app that lets you practice throwing balls in a near-identical environment to the real game."

#PokemonGO: Hey everyone, I've spent the last couple of months working in Unity to replicate Pokemon GO's throwing physics for use in a target practice app. I noticed a common issue amongst my friends was that they didn't throw curveballs (which apparently make you 70% more likely to successfully catch your prey), because they kept wasting balls every time they tried to practice. So I set about trying to make an app which replicates the throwing mechanic and physics of Pokemon GO for people to practice on.The most important part for an app like this is for it to have accurate physics. So what I did was open up the physics modifiers inside the app for anyone to tweak, just in case you don't like the defaults. On top of this, I've also made the target's position and size completely customiseable so people can practice hitting it at different ranges.I've even added 24 Pokemon presets which I am fairly confident accurately represent the distances of those Pokemon within the official game (including Dragonite and Lapras). I'd add more, but I need particular screenshots of each Pokemon I want to add, and without any easy way to track them, I can't really get any more than that for now.By the way, if you're wondering how valid my claim is of the target distances (and also the camera position) being accurate, I used 3D scene reconstruction techniques to find the camera height/angle and the target positions. I'm confident that it is, if not perfect, then pretty close to perfect.The app still has a few bugs which I'm working on (balls occasionally don't go where they're supposed to, but hey, if I'm trying to copy Pokemon GO, I'd call that a feature), and I don't know if I'll ever manage to make the throwing feel perfectly similar to PoGO, but I feel in its current state it provides fairly reliable target and curveball practice.You can find it on the Google Play Store (for free) here: http://ift.tt/2dVpTg0 free to give it a try and let me know what you think. I'm open to criticism, because this app is only as useful as its ability to accurately mirror PoGO's throwing mechanic. Unfortunately it's not currently available on iOS. If there's enough interest, then I could justify the cost of porting it.Note: It seems that currently devices with smaller screens/resolutions, with a DPI/PPI of around 200-250, or lower, may have problems with this app. The ball will be incredibly difficult to throw. If this is the case for you, please let me know, as I'm working to fix this. via /r/pokemongo http://ift.tt/2eqTWhX