Original Post
Hello I have 2 vectors (128,0,0) and (128,0,128). They are coplanar. They are actually represented as doubles in C++. I need to find the normal of these. Now I have taken the cross product and the result is: (0, -16384,0) (I think :)) Now I need to normalize the normal vector, by doing: sqrt(x^2, y^2, z^2) and then dividing each component of the normal vector by the result of this square root. My problem is: 16384^2 is a big big number and I may have vectors with components even larger than 128. I am worrying about overflow here. I am not a maths guru, so I ask: what can I do to "compress" this 16384 value down before normalizing without affecting the computation? (Also, check my working if you can :) ) Thanks