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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

Do you really have to be a math genius to work as a game dev?

I can see you would need very solid math and physics to build the next gen 3d graphics/physics engines although I remember an interview with John Carmack where he said that even he wasn't as good a mathematician as people thought he was.

Surely there's plenty of code that goes into games that isn't advanced linear algebra? Like code for networking , game saving/loading , menu systems , IAP payment systems etc. Stuff that probably has more in common with general web programming. It's also possible to buy or get for free various engines to do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

Also some of the most popular games now are 2d or isometric, you could probably write a 2d game from scratch without much more than basic trigonometry , linear algebra and plenty of trial and error.

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Between gameplay programming and tools, a significant portion of the programming staff of a AAA game will not be overwhelmingly mathematically inclined. That's only one of many outright lies in this article.

Not a reddit reader, but I do follow Tarn Adams & Dwarf Fortress pretty closely (serious amount of respect for someone who can build a single game over a really really long time and call it his life's work, and live only on donations.)

This quote from his recent AMA really stood out to me -- "I'm sure my code is considered garbage by people that know what they are doing." And he has a very strong math background.

Hey, you would have thought SimCity would have needed "strong math abilities". But no. Bottom line is, these things don't have to be "accurate", they can bumble along faking it, so given the lack of scientific rigour the industry clearly doesn't require strong math.

You may not need to be a math genius, but it severely limits what you can do. There are much fewer programmers working on game logic and many more resources devoted to graphics, physics, pathfinding, AI, tools, and so on. And if you aren't a high-powered dynamo, your chances of getting into the industry at all is low.

Plus you may not use it, but the logical framework and understanding of math is crucial to developers in general. I have yet to meet a good software developer who wasn't at least competent at collegiate-level math.

From my limited experience writing simple crappy 3D engines and using pre-built engines such as Torque. You don't need much math knowledge at all.

* If you actually writing an engine, maybe some linear algebra, calculus. OpenGL/DirectX provides quite a bit of this out of the box. Yes you need to develop some special skills but nothing amazing.

* AI in games is generally heavily scripted. There is some use of common AI ideas in RTS games, for example Monte-Carlo Markov Chains was used in Dark Reign (I think Unreal tournament 2k4 did this as well). It's nothing fancy, most AI in games could be written by someone that took an undergraduate AI class. Writing AI is more about understanding the players expectation of the game.

* Pathfinding is also heavily scripted. In many cases they will just define tracks for NPCs to move on, the NPCs will move to the nearest track and then follow it to their destination.

>There are much fewer programmers working on game logic and many more resources devoted to graphics, physics, pathfinding, AI, tools, and so on.

Many game companies are using an out of the box engine, the jobs are in scripting the game which is primarily game logic and backend stuff, just really boring game logic.

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