Took a couple days to learn about how to go about making themes for WordPress. This is basically annoying enough to where I can see why people pay others to do this for them. From a design aspect, it’s hard to not go too overboard with “neat stuff” while keeping it simple and to the point.
Bubble Zing 1.0.3 went live late last night on the official Android market. This update carries with it a slew of enhancements and fixes, mostly aimed at tablet users, but some applied to phones as well.
We have also posted this game to alternate market sites, like slideme.org and pdassi.
There’s lots of reasons, but as I explain on http://eondev.blogspot.com/2012/02/design-to-product-requirements-creep-11.html, one of the reasons is something called requirements creep. This basically reflects something that never can get done, because the things we’re working on keep changing, or “getting better”… leading to a state of never getting done.
If you’re a software person, or want to be, you might want to keep yourself in check by reading that article and reflecting on your own projects with this information.
I’ve thought about and even been asked over the years exactly how much math do computer programmers need to know, specifically for games development. Well, this is a tough question to answer.
I can safely say “just enough to get by”. Do you need calculus? Geometry? Algebra? Maybe, perhaps, and quite possibly. It really all depends on what you’re programming. If you’re doing core game engine programming, or working in 3d graphics, you will likely want to deal with Linear Algebra, some trig, and definitely some regular algebra. It is tough to pitch something like calculus in here because on one hand, you don’t want to do *too much* math, and on the other if you do too little, your engine won’t work correctly and you won’t know why.
Let’s face it, computers are awesome at math, but even they feel the burden when you want to calculate a million floating point operations a second — and if that is just to cram a bunch of cubes in to the volume of a sphere, 60 times a second — not to mention do collision detection on all of them; you definitely don’t want to be doing as much math as possible. However, there are some times where this is necessary. So again, you might need all that advanced math, but you should at all costs avoid doing it wherever possible.
Creatively thinking and programming around logic to not do math is challenging, but saves a lot of CPU time if done right.
If you’re doing anything but graphics, but something more like statistical analysis programming or something, you will definitely want some basic algebra, but really that’s about as far as you’ll need.
I personally feel that it is important for programmers to understand mathematical concepts more than cranking out formulas. Most of the time, I end up making up my own formulas for whatever I’m doing. It’s reassuring to see that the formulas I make up are usually well established things in the math world – like the formula for interpolating the position of a point along a 2d line, for example.
So, do you need math? Yes, but to what extent really depends on what you will be doing. If you want to be able to tackle anything and everything, then you will want advanced math, but for the most part, most programmers out there won’t need that much.
I’ll rant and rave about boolean algebra later.
Several classic titles in video game history have some amazing music, and a relatively unknown game named Axelay had some awesome tracks to it.
Check out Unkai, the first level’s music. Amazing.