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Never say never! I worked on the original Dead Space (2008). There’s a minigame in chapter 4 where you have to defend the ship’s hull from incoming asteroids by shooting them with a cannon. On completion of the challenge, there’s some explanation as to why the cannon’s auto-targetting system is back online and you can leave the minigame and the cannon automatically continues shooting asteroids as you wander off. While I was rummaging around the code for this, I stumbled across a quadratic formula implementation. On closer inspection I discovered that some smart cookie had actually implemented the cannon’s auto-targetting system for real! It actually tracked each asteroid’s velocity and speed and aimed ahead of the target to hit it with its slow-moving projectiles. I just assumed the whole thing would be playing a canned animation faking the cannon shooting at the asteroids. My hat goes off to the programmer that decided to solve that problem - it’s one of the very few times I’ve ever seen the quadratic formula used in gamedev!
The hard math is figuring out the path (because small imprecision in the guessed location of the object over time can pretty easily cause meaningful errors. If you control the engine and know the real vectors, projecting their path out isn’t super complicated.
But I’m all for the idea that knowing a variety of math allows you to solve a lot more problems.
Never say never! I worked on the original Dead Space (2008). There’s a minigame in chapter 4 where you have to defend the ship’s hull from incoming asteroids by shooting them with a cannon. On completion of the challenge, there’s some explanation as to why the cannon’s auto-targetting system is back online and you can leave the minigame and the cannon automatically continues shooting asteroids as you wander off. While I was rummaging around the code for this, I stumbled across a quadratic formula implementation. On closer inspection I discovered that some smart cookie had actually implemented the cannon’s auto-targetting system for real! It actually tracked each asteroid’s velocity and speed and aimed ahead of the target to hit it with its slow-moving projectiles. I just assumed the whole thing would be playing a canned animation faking the cannon shooting at the asteroids. My hat goes off to the programmer that decided to solve that problem - it’s one of the very few times I’ve ever seen the quadratic formula used in gamedev!
The hard math is figuring out the path (because small imprecision in the guessed location of the object over time can pretty easily cause meaningful errors. If you control the engine and know the real vectors, projecting their path out isn’t super complicated.
But I’m all for the idea that knowing a variety of math allows you to solve a lot more problems.