Live data from Hacker News

Essential Math for Games Programmers

essentialmath.com

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: Essential Math for Games Programmers

#21
post #20

How come is it essential if I don't really need most of that to build games these days? Correct title: "Math that might be useful for 2d+3d games with custom engines".

Even if all development moves over to a selection of a few engines (which won't happen), you'd still have to have people who make the engines, and they don't pop out of nowhere.

Re: Essential Math for Games Programmers

#22
post #3

Am I the only one who can't stand people trying to deliver technical information via power point slides?

And it gets especially annoying when those slides are rendered as a static PDF file. Lots of information gets repeated. It was especially ironic in the slides about Frames, Dictionaries and K-SVD, as they were talking about doing efficient and sparse representation of things.

I actually prefer slides in PDF form rather than .ppt/.pptx, as long as all the immediate transitions are omitted in the .pdf file. OpenOffice and LibreOffice have trouble rendering some .pptx files, and it's just less convenient than firing up a PDF reader

Re: Essential Math for Games Programmers

#23
post #13

A few years ago, the Wolfire team (AKA, the Humble Bundle originators), put together a great set of articles on linear algebra as it applies to game development. I think it's one of the most plainly-written and practical guides out there. I still mentally picture the diagrams when I've been out of the loop for a bit. http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/07/linear-algebra-for-game-deve...

I really enjoyed the link. The simple explanations are great. Thanks.

Re: Essential Math for Games Programmers

#25
I am going to reveal a bit of ignorance here. I code simply because I am horrid at math and since my work only entails business math I rarely have to even search for good examples. Balancing books, invoicing, etc, doesn't seem to stretch my math skills.

So which areas are still math intensive outside of engineering related work?

Re: Essential Math for Games Programmers

#26

I am going to reveal a bit of ignorance here. I code simply because I am horrid at math and since my work only entails business math I rarely have to even search for good examples. Balancing books, invoicing, etc, doesn't seem to stretch my math skills. So which areas are still math intensive outside of engineering related work?

All the exciting ones.

Re: Essential Math for Games Programmers

#29

I am going to reveal a bit of ignorance here. I code simply because I am horrid at math and since my work only entails business math I rarely have to even search for good examples. Balancing books, invoicing, etc, doesn't seem to stretch my math skills. So which areas are still math intensive outside of engineering related work?

Most people have a wrong conception of what math means. Math encompasses large parts of pretty much any engineering discipline including programming. At the end of the day the foundations of programming are boolean logic, turing machines, lambda calculus, etc. Those are all technically math so when you say you're horrid at math and that's why you code that doesn't really make any sense.

More generally, using any kind of analytical approach to solve problems is math.

Re: Essential Math for Games Programmers

#30

I am going to reveal a bit of ignorance here. I code simply because I am horrid at math and since my work only entails business math I rarely have to even search for good examples. Balancing books, invoicing, etc, doesn't seem to stretch my math skills. So which areas are still math intensive outside of engineering related work?

Is professor of mathematics "engineering related"? If not, it's a trivial example :-P

More generally, there are a number of fields that rely on statistics and modelling of various sophistication. Parts of finance, insurance, polling...

Post reply on HN