https://hackaday.com/2022/05/17/book-teaches-gaming-math/
If we knew how much math goes into writing a video game, we might have paid more attention in math class. If you need a refresher, [Fletcher Dunn] and [Ian Parbery] have their book "3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development" available free online. The book was originally a paper book from 2011 with a 2002 first edition but those are out of print now. However, math is math, so regardless of the age of the book, it is worth a look. For now, the online version is a bunch of web pages, but we hear a PDF or E-reader version is forthcoming
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(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 21 2022, @10:09PM (13 children)
》However, math is math, so regardless of the age of the book, it is worth a look.
Not true. I'm glad I reviewed this book before letting my child read it since it is filled with binary pronouns. Shame on you for attempting to foist these outdated pages on poor unsuspecting parents.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Saturday May 21 2022, @10:46PM (10 children)
In high school you should already have learned about matricies and how to manipulate them. One can take a course in Linear Algebra. Or online courses. Or -- OMG! -- YouTube videos and lectures on the subject -- even from MIT!
This has applications in AI and other areas besides video games.
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(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Snotnose on Sunday May 22 2022, @12:19AM (2 children)
I learned nothing of the sort in high school. I learned it from Byte magazine when I was learning graphics on my TRS-80 with Z80 assembly language.
CSB
My Linear Algebra instructor was a piece of shit. I was holding a steady A in that class, then things worked out I took a week long vacation to Cancun with my gf (it was her schedule that said we went during the semester). Went to the teach, told him I was going to be gone for a week (3 class days), and asked if he planned to have a test when I got back. Making sure he knew if so I'd take my book and study it while on vacay. He said no. We went to Cancun/Cozumel, had a great time, got a pic of me on the beach reading my textbook with a Corona in my hand.
Get back Sunday afternoon, monday morning is class. With a test. That I had not prepared for in the least because A) teach said "no worries"; and B) teach didn't say which chapter the test would be on (he was skipping random chapters in the text all semester).
Needless to say I failed that test, which brought my A down to a B-.
I hope that SDSU teacher circa '86-'87 is rotting in hell right now.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 22 2022, @02:25PM
Syllabus should have told you test dates and lecture topics.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Sunday May 22 2022, @03:24PM
My high school math teacher (multiple subjects, small school) was a gem. He encouraged learning. He was eager to answer questions.
In another post not long ago on a subject about Sinclair calculators, I wrote about how this teacher patiently answered my questions about how could a scientific calculator do things like raise a floating point number to a floating point power. What does it even mean to calculate, say, five to the pi power? The calculator would do it. And I could calculate the pi root of the result. SO how was this magic actually done? He explained to me about how logarithms is the third part of powers and roots. Three is company, two is insufficient.
I had also mentioned somewhere where he had some old college math textbooks (multiple copies of same book for a classroom). I was reading one he loaned me. I was loving the linear algebra part. My fascination was with how using matrix inversion one could systematically (and thus computer) solve simultaneous linear equations. And the Wang 2200 PCS computer we had just happened to allow BASIC variables to be matricies and offered statements like:
40 MAT A = B * INV(C)
etc.
The day came he was required to dispose of these very old textbooks. He could not give me one. But he mentioned that he would be throwing them in a very specific dumpster at precisely 5 PM on that day.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 22 2022, @01:08AM
Not really, it wasn't required when I was in highschool, and there are far more useful skills for high schoolers to be learning that would actually benefit them in the future. Anything that gets covered much past algebra has to be taught again in college anyways.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Sunday May 22 2022, @02:41AM (4 children)
To be fair, the book also covers high school level physics.
And I've taken a fair amount of linear algebra, and let me tell you, and I've yet to write a game that needs a laplace transform, eigenvalues, eigenvectors, multivariate differential equations, Grahm Schmidt, spanning sets, or any of the other technically useful somewhere parts of linear algebra.
It's just quartions, vectors, and high school matrix math. Take calc 3 instead. That actually comes up.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday May 22 2022, @07:20PM (3 children)
quaternions?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 22 2022, @07:53PM (1 child)
Octonions? But then Cayley-Dickson [wikipedia.org] says "Sedenions?" It's algebras all the way down.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday May 23 2022, @08:27PM
Let's draw this further.
Since you can draw it on, and on each step the old algebra in represented in the new one as the terms with the second half of the coefficients being zero, you can take the limit, which then consists of an algebra consisting of all sequences with finite support (i.e. only finitely many coefficients are nonzero), with component-wise addition and multiplication. I don't know if that has even a name.
But then, why stop there? After all, the algebraic formula still can be applied. So we get pairs of those infinite-dimensional algebras, then quadruples, and so on, until we get the next limit.
And of course we don't have to stop there either. Indeed, I don't see the need to ever stop; surely there's no problem reaching even an uncountable number of coefficients (you won't be able to write those down, but hey, they are most likely useless anyway, so why should we care?)
Oh, and let's start out not with the real numbers, but with the surreal numbers. Because why not?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday May 23 2022, @01:12AM
yes sorry, typo.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday May 22 2022, @05:10PM
My high school didn't cover matrices at all: it doesn't seem to be part of the sylabus in my neck of the woods.
It's covered in first year engineering/math/CS degree courses, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @05:20AM (1 child)
what the fuck are pronouns doing in a math book?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday May 23 2022, @08:29PM
The pronoun “it” surely is used a lot in about every math book.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 21 2022, @11:32PM
RPG minmaxing and pathing
do they cover any graph theory or is it just trig?
i demand an edition with intersectional trig and example implementations in feminist [hastac.org] programming [hastac.org] languages [hastac.org] that include critical analysis through humanities frameworks
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 21 2022, @11:40PM
Wrong thread:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=49363&page=1&cid=1246944#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 24 2022, @10:53AM
~350p of up-to-date OpenGL practices uses python's PyGame: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.1201/9781003181378/developing-graphics-frameworks-python-opengl-lee-stemkoski-michael-pascale [taylorfrancis.com]
Authors are a math phd and cs bsc and the book uses the newer opengl 3 pipeline so what you'll be learning will apply to embedded too. Prerequisites-wise, it teaches all the vector math so you only really need to know some basic python. And python being python, if you know literally any other programming language, you'll be able to fumble your way through the book and learn python like that.
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