I want to improve my skills..
Author
First off all , i havent finished school yet...im a student.
I made this thread to ask if anyone knows any good way to learn advanced math & physics functions used in games.
Where can i find some good tutorials ?
Thanks.
Well these days there are a lot of SDK's out there that will do most of the work for you, all you have to do is provide the data. If you interested in knowing what goes in to games check out the Resources section of the website or hit up your local book store and check out the table to contents on the books they have there. Barnes and Noble and Booksamillion have tons of Gamedev books these days, and if you have a Borders bookstore around you they have an entire section devoted to it. :) Good luck.
I assume you know trigonometry already. If not, go learn trig!
You can do courses on "Linear Algebra" at universities etc, but it's basically just an extension of trig. Linear algebra will teach you dot-products, cross-products and other vector-maths. This vector maths is very useful in games, from doing basic physics to collision detection to anything!
If you just search for "Linear Algebra" on google you should be able to find some good resources.
The other maths knowledge you will use a fair bit in games is matrices (mostly 4x4 or 3x3 arrays). Theres actually a fair few articles on matricies on gamedev!
Fortunately, when making games, someone will have already implemented the code to do a matrix multiplication or a dot-product for you, so you dont need to memorise how to do that stuff, but you do need to memorise how you can use the results. For example, if you have a point in space, and you want to rotate it, you can use your matrix multiply function to do that for you, or if you have 2 vectors that represent directions, you can use a dot-product to find the angle between them...
Actually, theres quite a few "math and physics" articles on gamedev which you might find useful!
You can do courses on "Linear Algebra" at universities etc, but it's basically just an extension of trig. Linear algebra will teach you dot-products, cross-products and other vector-maths. This vector maths is very useful in games, from doing basic physics to collision detection to anything!
If you just search for "Linear Algebra" on google you should be able to find some good resources.
The other maths knowledge you will use a fair bit in games is matrices (mostly 4x4 or 3x3 arrays). Theres actually a fair few articles on matricies on gamedev!
Fortunately, when making games, someone will have already implemented the code to do a matrix multiplication or a dot-product for you, so you dont need to memorise how to do that stuff, but you do need to memorise how you can use the results. For example, if you have a point in space, and you want to rotate it, you can use your matrix multiply function to do that for you, or if you have 2 vectors that represent directions, you can use a dot-product to find the angle between them...
Actually, theres quite a few "math and physics" articles on gamedev which you might find useful!
I think Hodgman just about covered it (nice post there!). The most important parts of maths and physics for game development are, imo:
- Vector and matrix operations. Essential for any 3D game, even if you don't actually have to do the operations you have to understand when to use them and what the results mean.
- Numerical integration is very important for physics based games. Analytical calculus isn't necessary in most cases.
- The physics of elastic and inelastic collisions, moments of inertia etc. This group of subjects is called rigid body dynamics.
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