Is there a 'perfect' arc for sinking a shot? Let's actually find out.

Every basketball shot is a trajectory problem whether the shooter thinks about it that way or not. Launch angle, launch speed, and gravity are the only three things deciding whether the ball arcs into the net or bounces off the back of the rim — everything else about the shot (form, release, all of it) is really just a human trying to control those three numbers consistently.

The Hoops preset drops you into exactly that setup: a ball, a hoop, and the Push tool to launch it. Because it's a real interactive physics simulation running on an actual physics engine, the trajectory isn't a pre-baked animation — change your aim and the whole arc changes with it, bounce and all if you clip the rim.

Turn on the aim/trajectory line before you shoot and you'll see the predicted arc laid out as a dotted curve — a parabola, same shape every time, just stretched or squashed depending on your launch angle and speed. Watch enough shots and the pattern becomes obvious: too flat and it's a line drive into the backboard, too steep and it barely clears the rim, and somewhere in the middle is the arc that actually swishes.

That's the whole point of leaving this open-ended instead of grading it — there's no "correct" answer being checked here, just a sandbox for testing your own intuition about arcs against what gravity actually does. And because every preset carries the sandbox's four Knowledge Levels, you can go from "arcs curve because gravity pulls it down" at Curious all the way to the actual range equation at Expert, on the same shot.

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