Best way to learn maths required for game development?

Cromulent · 9 Dec 2019 at 19:10

I've been programming for several years but what has always held me back was my poor ability when it comes to maths. I've decided that I am going to break through the pain barrier and learn the maths required to make games. The only trouble is that I have no idea where to start as I haven't done any practical maths since I was in school.

Would starting from GCSE revision guides be a good start? I'm quite keen to keep the learning fun as I don't want to get put off.

Are there any websites which allow you to solve maths problems on them for practice? I'm quite a hands-on learner and would be appreciated being able to practice on my laptop (no desk at the moment, unfortunately, so I can't do much handwriting).

Cromulent · 9 Dec 2019 at 22:02

Thanks, guys. I'll see what I can do when modding a game in that case and I'll check out Project Euler as well. I'm motivated at the moment and want to put that motivation to good use. I'd like to understand the maths behind games, but I'll settle for a working knowledge if it means I can make games.

Cromulent · 9 Dec 2019 at 22:27

jsmoke said:
Why not use a game engine like unreal?

That is the plan. In fact, I have some Unreal engine programming videos to watch. I still want to learn the maths required though.

Cromulent · 10 Dec 2019 at 14:06

Spunkey said:
Going straight to Unreal is jumping in at the deep end. You may want to consider starting off easy by doing some 2D work in in Unity first. Here's a good video covering an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF04Fi9OCPc

In fact his whole channel is great for Unity related work: https://www.youtube.com/user/Cercopithecan/videos

I do have the advantage of doing C++ programming in the past so hopefully, it won't be too much of a jump. Having said that if I struggle then I'll certainly switch over to Unity (or as another person in this thread suggested I'll look into modding games with the full source code available).

Cromulent · 11 Dec 2019 at 15:31

mid_gen said:
If you know some C++ then you should be ok with Unreal, there's just a bit of learning curve to understand it's reflection system, and the macros and stuff required to get it to work. In terms of maths, speaking as a profession game dev...the basic things you need to know are :

Vectors
Dot Product
Cross Product
Quaternions (not necessarily how they work, just what they're useful for)
Basic Trigonometry (pythagoras, sine, cosine etc)

With those basics you can get on your way. You'll soon get into things like calculus, various collision detection techniques and other algorithms, but you can just look them as you need em.

Really in game dev you're not so much interested in the Maths side of things, mostly algorithms, which ones to use and what for.

Cool. Thanks. That is a really useful post. I think I should be able to get up to speed on those pretty quickly. It is nice to know that the maths side of things isn't as important as I once believed since I've always been hopeless at maths. I just want to make a game really badly.

Cromulent · 11 Dec 2019 at 15:38

mid_gen said:
There are aspects of game development where you can go very deep into the mathematics side of things....but a decent grasp of vectors and associated stuff is all you really need to commit to memory. I have a big reference book of Mathematics for 3D game programmers that I dive into when I need anything I don't know off the top of my head....

Wouldn't hurt to be a maths whiz of course, but Matrix learning tech isn't a thing yet, so....

Oh, what is the book called? Sounds useful.

Cromulent · 11 Dec 2019 at 17:36

mid_gen said:
The ISBN is 1435458869. It's not particularly beginner friendly, you're better off with online tutorials for the basics tbh, but a good reference.

Thanks. I'll see what I can come up with. There is a video series on GameDev.tv that I got from a Humble Bundle which I am going to watch. No idea if it is any good or not though.

Cromulent · 12 Dec 2019 at 04:03

jsmoke said:
Have a look at this. It's the model loader in idtech4(doom 3). A lot is learning how to use OpenGL(or DirectX).

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3/blob/master/neo/renderer/Model.cpp

Thanks. That looks interesting. So with the maths outlined in the post by @mid_gen what would I be able to do? Simple 3D movement with some collision detection as well?

Cromulent · 13 Dec 2019 at 13:51

akaFonzie said:
I think the best way to learn it is to practice it tbh!
I'd avoid all the game engines for now, as whilst you can investigate the maths and rewrite some of the behaviour a lot of it is obfuscated from the programmer, whereas if you wrote some simple 2D/3D simulations using say C++ and OpenGL or whatever combination of language/graphics API you wanted you'd be required to do all the maths from scratch unless you use a library.

I'll have a play around then with DirectX and C++ and see what I can come up with. I'll save the Unreal engine until I know more about what is going on under the hood.

Cromulent · 16 Dec 2019 at 20:50

dowie said:
You asked about maths several months ago OP and I wrote quite a big post in reply - I thought you were going to start a maths degree this October (in which case you'll likely cover pretty much all of the maths you'll need and more)?

Thank you for the really useful post. I've snipped most of it out of the quote to make it more manageable but I just wanted to highlight this bit of it.

You are quite right. I've had some health issues recently and completely forgot about that post and your other useful reply. I was going to start a maths degree but after a lot of thought and soul searching I ended up going with a business degree as I thought it would suit me better. I'm still interested in maths as this thread shows but I'm doing it more for enjoyment now rather than for any academic reason. I've wanted to make a game for ages and now I have the time to work towards that.

Thank you again for all of the help. It is very much appreciated.