Yesterday I made it so that you could control the pitch, heading, and roll of your ship using the mouse and cursor keys. Pitch and heading adjustment works fine, but roll is dependent on the direction that your ship is facing; I actually suspect that the other two have similar problems as well, just not as pronounced. This led me to start reading through physics articles to try and find a solution.

While reading the articles I was reminded that I still don't know much about mathematical programming (linear, quadratic...), which seems to pop up a lot in physics and makes an appearance in collision detection. I figure this is as good a time as any to correct that, so I have started going through the free classes on the Stanford website located here: http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/ Class EE263 is a prerequisite for the convex optimization classes, so I'm starting there. If this starts taking too long, I may decide to postpone further study in this area, but hopefully I won't have to.

Writing blog entries will be a bit challenging for a variety of reasons, but the plan is to continue updating at least five times per week. The last thing I want to do is just repeat what's said in the lectures, so I may draw from multiple sources when I discuss what I have learned.

Reposted from http://invisiblegdev.blogspot.com/