Chris Hecker

This is great. This reminds me of Chris Hecker's Rigid Body Dynamics series from GDMag/Gamasutra that I read (checks watch) almost 30 years ago! This is the classic/canonical set of articles. https://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics

I love rasterization. It's such a cool algorithm. Everyone should write a software rasterizer! Why bother? Because it's heckin' cool, mate. But beyond that, it will also give you a much deeper understanding of a modern graphics pipeline (just in time for it to be replaced by AI rendering within the next decade). I used Chris Hecker's 5-part series to learn how to do rasterization: http://www.chrishecker.com/Miscellaneous_Technical_Articles He walks you through the math and the code simultaneously, which is deliciously rare. Usually you get one or the other, but having both is delightful.

Start here. Work through all 5 parts. http://chrishecker.com/Miscellaneous_Technical_Articles You'll have to implement each part yourself to understand them. It's not something that can be skimmed. But it's so worth it. After that, most of the mystery of graphics will be gone. (But not the thrill.) One of the most frustrating aspects of learning graphics programming was that most resources immediately start talking about theory. Partial derivatives of uv's and xy's, gradient values and mipmap selection, and you're just trying to draw a damn picture on a triangle. Learning from working code and implementing it yourself is a better teacher.

As a complement, Chris Hecker has kept some of his notes regarding OpenGL vs. Direct3D around: http://chrishecker.com/OpenGL It seemed quite important at the time that he- who begat WinG, which begat DirectX, some of which is covered in Renegades of the Empire, which someone else mentioned, which is certainly worth reading- went on to agitate for OpenGL over Direct3D. Now there's kind of a scrapheap of history vibe off of the whole thing.

this is an amusing article that points out some of the more classic examples of wolfram's risible self-promotion. it's odd, however, that this critique comes from someone whose own webpage offers 3 headshots of himself, including one at the astronomic resolution of 1650x2135. (http://chrishecker.com/Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png)

Reminded me of this classic: >A group of friends and I used to do dramatic readings of the About the Author text from the Mathematica Book, which begins thusly: >About the Author >Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today. >The guy wrote that himself. >Wait, while searching for that, I see he updated it slightly in later versions: >About the Author >Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, and a well-known scientist. He is widely regarded as the most important innovator in technical computing today, as well as one of the world's most original research scientists. >I guess the original didn't fully express the boundless expanse of his awesomeness. >"Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?" http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_Off_Right_N…

Depends on what you want to learn about, a degree in astrophysics or aeronautial engineering prepares you for many different possible jobs. I'm in a somewhat similar situation, maybe this will help: (DISCLAIMER: I am not an aerospace engineer by training) Calculus: You'll definitely need to be very comfortable with single variable calculus and vector calculus up to partial derivatives, vector calculus integrals (Green, Stokes, Gauss) will definitely help. I wouldn't learn that from a book, try MIT's OCW, there is a calculus course covering all that. Learn the basic about ODEs, and be comfortable around PDE notation. Linear Algebra: In some sub-disciplines such as control and signal processing you'll also need to be very comfortable with linear algebra, so that all those matrices and stuff don't get in the way when learning modern control/DSP. I definitely recommend Prof. Strang's course in OCW for this. Try to at least be comfortable with simple ODEs before starting it. Linear algebra also helps a lot with Physics. To get more into lineal algebra maybe you can read Linear Algebra Done Right if you want to learn more about Hilbert Spaces, and then maybe Shilov for tensors... those two books should be optional... Software: You don't need to be fast or maybe even know how to solve complex integrals in pen and paper. Try to complement learning calculus, differential equations and linear algebra with learning Matlab/Simulink and Mathematica. I can't even find a word to…

Making a 2d rigid-body physics engine is a really fun project. I made one myself in javascript before learning about linear algebra. And I dug deep into the maths to get it working. Despite months of work, I barely scratched the surface beyond the widely known basics. Making a stable engine where objects don't compress into one another or jitter is a rabbit hole without a bottom that even the most math-heavy articles I could find rarely touched. I used a series of old articles by Christ Hecker to understand the maths myself. http://www.chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics

Ye good ol' Microsoft stiffled OpenGL on Windows, hence open letter https://www.chrishecker.com/OpenGL/Press_Release not to mention insidious thing they did on Fahrenheit (next gen OpenGL+Direct3D, one to rule them all) when they were supposed to be working on it together with SGI. Microsoft did a well job after with it, but they were and are a shit company that made sus maneuvers to make success; Not all of them technical.

(via Deep Work) How to Depth Jam: http://chrishecker.com/The_Depth_Jam

And the reason for this is because back in the day, in 2003, Microsoft ran a Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt (FUD for short) campaign mostly based on false claims, such as that OpenGL would be put behind a compatibility layer with a significant performance cost. Simultaneously, Microsoft left the OpenGL Architecture Review Board giving a strong signal they were not supporting OpenGL anymore. Everyone freaked out and moved to Direct3D. http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-Dire… http://chrishecker.com/images/3/33/Gdmogl.pdf Despite the technical differences, if you think this is morable acceptable, by all means do you all your development on Windows. Allow someone else to build a monopoly with no real gain for you.

there is an interesting, but quite old, paper here from the spore guys http://chrishecker.com/images/c/cb/Sporeanim-siggraph08.pdf

On a somewhat related note: http://chrishecker.com/images/f/fc/Wspector2-small.png

Attributed to Casey Muratori by http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_Off_Right_N… - “Does anyone want to bet as to which will gain self-awareness first: Wolfram Alpha or Wolfram, Stephen?”

http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_Off_Right_N… credits casey muratori for the quip

I think this is more a short discussion on positive / negative feedback systems in games, rather than player motivation. The links you shared are interesting regardless though, so thanks for sharing! Some other motivation-related links: http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_considered_harmful%3F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF7aJMXU_W0 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130155/rethinking_carrots_a_new_…

This year at the Game Developer Conference, Chris Hecker had an entirely wordless rant about the state of creativity in the AAA space, essentially using AAA's PR to point out how little real innovation is happening in that space. [1] It's received quite a bit of attention and agreement in the industry. [1] http://chrishecker.com/Fair_Use

Speaking of which, here's David Maynard himself posing (lower-right) in EA's first software-artist-themed "Can a Computer Make You Cry?" advertisement: http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F

I never worked for EA, but I know people. 1993 EA has nothing to do with EA from 1996 onwards... EA screwed Origin (that then they already owned, just read stuff about development of Ultima 8 and 9... there are lots of documents about how executive meddling made U8 a meh game, and U9 a totally ruined game), then bought and ruined Westwood, and so on. Also as the time passed they got more and more problems with employees. Then we had crazy shit, like when EA closed a studio in LA, and people found out that the studio had more middle managers than grunts, and this is why the studio could not decide what to do, it simply had so much people giving orders and so few people doing, that doing stuff was impossible. The EA that wrote this: http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F doesn't exist anymore.

This 2010 Game Developer's Conference lecture by Chris Hecker is a good introduction to the concerns imo: http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F

Criticism welcome. I too have "Rules of play", but it is still standing there on my desk, unopened - no time now, writing a new game script :) On "legitimize our pursuits" you could check this writing by Hecker (always stimulating): http://chrishecker.com/Going_Against_The_Grain

In addition to the links _delirium provided, http://chrishecker.com/My_Liner_Notes_for_Spore/Spore_Behavior_Tree_Do… http://aigamedev.com/insider/presentations/behavior-trees/#recording http://books.google.ru/books?id=1OJ8EhvuPXAC&lpg=PA370&ots=iSW… and for people who prefer XML there is a simular architecture based on FSMs called XABSL, http://www.xabsl.de/ which is used heavily among Robocup teams.

I like this page on that subject, particularly noticing how Wolfram made his own author blurb more crackpottish as time went on: http://chrishecker.com/Kurt_G%C3%B6del_is_Laughing_His_Ass_Off_Right_N…

If you like this stuff check this out: http://chrishecker.com/Advanced_Prototyping Edit: OK, this time I succumbed to karma whoring and posted it as a news item; make any comments in that page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409861

>>book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become I've tried that before, many times. Unfortunately when you are trying to do real work those books are many times useless. Example, I kept trying to build a newtonian physics simulator so I got a Statics and Dynamics mechanical engineering book. The book was a text book for Mechanical engineering students and yet the examples they teach you are for toy problems. I could not generalize them to real world scenarios. To actually build the physics simulator I had to scour the internet until I found something that actually explained what I needed in an easy to understand manner [1]. And that still was not enough. I still had to use more online sources to find out all the other pieces, like the separating axes theorem for collision detection. So no, I would not rely on books anymore, at least not exclusively since they often do not provide a full picture. One last thing, books seem to be getting progressively worse in my experience. All of this is anecdotal of course. [1]http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics