I've been idle in development for a bit, so I hope you'll humor a boring wall of text for at least one entry.
Lately, I've been distracted heavily, both by school and a deluge of recent releases. I partly program to entertain myself, after all, and if I'm already entertained then it's hard to find the motivation. However, there's more to it than that - school has been very stressful this semester for reasons I just can't put my finger on.
Thus, I made a choice that will heavily impact how I spend my time until May: I dropped a Calculus class. This both relieves a great deal of stress and frees up a giant heap of time. The class isn't necessary for my major (though the math skills may come in handy for programming - I'm keeping the book to teach myself when I feel I've the time). I'd really rather spend that time programming and designing.
Of course, where programming and designing come in, so also does research. First Spelunky and now X-Com:Apocolypse. It seems I've been seeking inspiration in existing games to try to figure out how to put together this idea of mine.
From Spelunky, we've a good example of something a lot of us are trying to build: an unlimited content engine in the same spirit of a Roguelike. Why not? We're often one-man bands around here, and crafting your own content isn't nearly as long term effective nor as entertaining for ourselves as is teaching the program to craft its own.
From X-Com: Apocolypse, I have something a bit too ambitious. After all, it took Microprose 3 games to get this done (and the Laser Squad team behind it certainly developed games before that). I'm speaking specifically of this idea of having a dynamically changing cityscape in which tactical combat occurs that impacts it.
Put those two together, and you've an idea of what I've been trying to do for the past few months. Probably longer. When it gets too hard for me to do, it's time to simplify. When I've simplified to the point where I bores me, I humor my ambitions a bit. Back and forth it goes, down to complete rewrites more than once, and this is why I haven't finished anything yet.
Perhaps it's normal for me to waffle between trying to keep the game simple and trying to make a reasonably complex game. A program is rarely designed from the top down or the bottom up, but rather little by little from both sides until it meets in the middle.
Feb 4 2010, 2:21 am
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Toadfish
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A friend of mine some eight years older than me is in the programming business. Dropped most of his math classes during his major. He eventually had to learn the stuff, but he mentioned he almost never uses it for the majority of what he does (management stuff mainly). I'd imagine it's important if you're going for a more "physics" or "engineering" oriented occ., but apparently math isn't all that important in the trade... maybe some prof. can vouch on this?
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Reassuring to know. I have run into a few things in which it's good to know a little math for in BYOND - mostly related to coordinates and converting differences to angles - but by and large I can agree it isn't used all that much.
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I made a faithful choiceWhat? | |
Vermolius wrote:
I made a faithful choiceWhat? It was a pretty odd framing for dropping Calculus class, wasn't it? It seemed momentous enough to me - I put a lot of thought into it. | |
Well, I do think basic trigonometry is necessary, but it's learned in high school. I think programmers very rarely go above the high school level, when they're not dealing with math-heavy projects, but I could be wrong.
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Toadfish wrote:
Well, I do think basic trigonometry is necessary, but it's learned in high school. I think programmers very rarely go above the high school level, when they're not dealing with math-heavy projects, but I could be wrong. If you want to be a run of the mill programmer, sure, stick with libraries written by people who actually know a bit of math. If you want to make something new or with better time complexity you might want to learn some maths. The first computer scientists were mathematicians after all. | |
I took trig back in high school, but it's been awhile, I needed to get re-familiarized with all those functions as well as pick up the knowledge of some new ones.
That said, the more one comes to know about math, the more one comes to know how to get the most out of computer program. The bottom line is that these are, after all, adding machines. Someone can import libraries to do most of those functions, but unless they now what those functions do, they become black boxes that are hard to apply well. I'm not saying I'm giving up on Calculus forever. Just that it wasn't something I could handle this semester on top of everything else. | |
I work with "4D" sections of space (volumes that change shape/location over time) and temporal collision detection (planes hit in 5 minutes time etc), typically calculus isn't needed. It can be, I admit, but not to any huge degree.
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