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This post gave me a great nostalgia moment and I imagine others have similar experiences. I remember trying to code a basic platformer at a young age in BASIC

This post gave me a great nostalgia moment and I imagine others have similar experiences. I remember trying to code a basic platformer at a young age in BASIC or something similar. Moving around the character and jumping are the most basic, essential functions. I tried to reason it out. Ok, so start off slow, after the character has been moving for a bit speed him up. For jumping, add some positive velocity and reverse it after a bit. It took forever to fine tune and still didn't really work that well. I gave up in the end. We didn't have the Internet then and I didn't really think about asking the librarian or similar 'how can i make a character jump about'. Fast forward a few years and my schoolteacher introduced the concept of Newtonian mechanics. Acceleration as a rate of change of velocity; the idea of a ballistic trajectory as a quadratic. Suddenly the problem becomes trivial! That eureka moment I can probably point to as the defining thing that made me choose to study higher level physics. (Part of it was probably being young and not having the reasoning skills I do now - but I also often think about how access to information is so different now. What would the ten year old me have done with access to Wikipedia? Mind boggling.)

fenomas 12y ago
You may already know this, but actually even a lot of modern game engines use nonphysical methods for moving characters - it's hard to make the character feel responsive using only impulses and friction, etc. I'm working on such an engine at the moment, and it wound up taking some hacking (e.g. I turn off the player's friction when a movement key is pressed - which makes sense when you think about it but seemed nonphysical at first!). With that said, you've reminded me of an example of this. Years ago I was making a "UFO catcher" crane game in Flash, where the user moves a thingy left and right, and an attached crane arm swings freely like a pendulum. At first I thought: this isn't a damned physics simulation, I'll just hack something up. Then I spent probably a whole day trying to get it to not feel so wrong. Then finally I break down and get the formula for pendulum motion off wikipedia, and 15 minutes later it works perfectly - with maybe three lines of physics code. :D

fenomas 12y ago

You may already know this, but actually even a lot of modern game engines use nonphysical methods for moving characters - it's hard to make the character feel responsive using only impulses and friction, etc. I'm working on such an engine at the moment, and it wound up taking some hacking (e.g. I turn off the player's friction when a movement key is pressed - which makes sense when you think about it but seemed nonphysical at first!). With that said, you've reminded me of an example of this. Years ago I was making a "UFO catcher" crane game in Flash, where the user moves a thingy left and right, and an attached crane arm swings freely like a pendulum. At first I thought: this isn't a damned physics simulation, I'll just hack something up. Then I spent probably a whole day trying to get it to not feel so wrong. Then finally I break down and get the formula for pendulum motion off wikipedia, and 15 minutes later it works perfectly - with maybe three lines of physics code. :D