a free book for would be game devs

[Nuke]

this was linked on one of my feeds. free online book that covers a lot of video game maths. useful for anyone going into game dev. wish i had this thing handy when i wrote my game engine.

https://gamemath.com/

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

13 hours ago, Nuke said:

when i wrote my game engine

...is not a phrase I read often. 

So to stay on topic - will you expand, describe the purpose of the game engine, the difficulties faced and how the book (see what I did there, @Gargamel?!?) could have helped you in this? 

[Gargamel]

14 hours ago, Nuke said:

when i wrote my game engine.

Thanks Joe, I meant to address this.   With the utmost respect, why did you decide to re-invent the wheel?  I assume you looked at existing engines, and decided it didn't fit your needs.  

[Nuke]

"wrote my own game engine" may have not been the correct phrase. more like "attempted to write my own game engine and never officially gave up".

its been a long running project. i was playing orbiter at the time, and coming off my freespace modding stint. i liked space flight sims but orbiter is kind of boring. my initial goal was to prove that a newtonian game could be fun. of course then ksp came out and rendered the whole project moot.

also i was more interested in the guts of the game than the game itself, and using a 3rd party engine doesnt give me that.

the book covers all the math you need for game dev. i only skimmed it, but it has some good stuff in there. it was posted on hack a day and i figured some of the up and coming game devs here could use it. 

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Nuke

[Pixophir]

Impossible to enumerate all the reasons why someone wants (or hast) to do their own framework. In scientifical simulation this is the normal ... I mean the norm.

I've tried Unreal, Unity, Godot and a few render frameworks and also decided to give it an own try. This may be not opportune here, but just look at KSP with its miniature planets with adapted physics because of the limits the engine Unity imposes. KSP physics are not accurate, though the game is fun. Orbiter had real size planets and integration methods up to the task, for atmospheric modelling (remember KSP's "soupmosphere" ?) and reasonable flight dynamics. KSP planes were more like submarines. Orbiter would not have been possible with an engine at that time. Orbiter's source code is online meanwhile (and it is a mess).

To the book, bowsing the contents, it seems to be another one that covers linear algebra well, good enough for the classical render pipeline. With the advent of ray tracing and heavier integration methods this will only be the start.

Happy hacking.

But yes, as a single developer, you either do an engine, or a game. That is an xor :-)

Edited June 25, 2022 by Pixophir

[Nuke]

20 minutes ago, Pixophir said:

Impossible to enumerate all the reasons why someone wants (or hast) to do their own framework. In scientifical simulation this is the normal ... I mean the norm.

I've tried Unreal, Unity, Godot and a few render frameworks and also decided to give it an own try. This may be not opportune here, but just look at KSP with its miniature planets with adapted physics because of the limits the engine Unity imposes. KSP physics are not accurate, though the game is fun. Orbiter had real size planets and integration methods up to the task, for atmospheric modelling (remember KSP's "soupmosphere" ?) and reasonable flight dynamics. KSP planes were more like submarines. Orbiter would not have been possible with an engine at that time. Orbiter's source code is online meanwhile (and it is a mess).

To the book, bowsing the contents, it seems to be another one that covers linear algebra well, good enough for the classical render pipeline. With the advent of ray tracing and heavier integration methods this will only be the start.

Happy hacking.

But yes, as a single developer, you either do an engine, or a game. That is an xor :-)

seems like rent-an-engine was more an evolution of the trend to make secondary income on the sale of an engine to a company wanting to make a similar game. then came the games that seemed to exist only as a tech demo for the engine, with the engine sales being the primary motivation. that happened with every ut, q3a, doom3, crysis, etc. game engines like unity, which as far as i know was not made with any particular kind of game in mind, but built as more of a framework. i guess there is a business incentive to keep the game development out of house where you can focus on the never ending job of engine development and maintenance. its also good for long running f2p or subscription games where you need to have a long term upgrade path to keep the game compatible with ever changing hardware capabilities.  

[Pixophir]

The sheer amount of documentation from trivial how-tos in more or less intelligent YT videos to series of textbooks, regularly evolving through new editions, discussions in forums, the number of open source engines on public repositories, etc. shows how populer the subject actually is.

With something in hand to show-off one could also join other projects and offer help extending an existing ecosystem.

[Charley]

On 5/19/2022 at 3:40 AM, Nuke said:

this was linked on one of my feeds. free online book that covers a lot of video game maths. useful for anyone going into game dev. wish i had this thing handy when i wrote my game engine.

This idea first came up when I wanted to make a game about literary characters from a school program that the teacher would like and I got a good grade. There were no problems with the description of the terms of reference for the game based on examples of 12 essays about angry men https://graduateway.com/essay-examples/12-angry-men/ I collected the entire theoretical part. But with the choice of frameworks and technologies, I had problems. Therefore, I decided to write my game from the beginning by creating my own technologies.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'm currently choosing a specialization and I think that game development is the most interesting job, so it's worth learning exactly this.

Edited February 2, 2023 by Charley