Yes! But there are lots of kinds of games, and none of my attempts were in 3d or involved physics. Also I've learned that without real users beating down my door for a feature I will not ever finish a project, so I've given up on "fun" coding entirely and haven't written any kind of game whatsoever in probably 15+ years. It's a waste of time for me, as I will not finish it. I need a guaranteed smiling face at the end of the process, or there's no chance I'll get far. If I decided I really wanted to make a game these days, unless unusual physics were vital to it, I'd probably let an existing engine take care of all that for me—why would I code it from scratch, when the point is to have a finished game, not manually write as much of it as possible at the expense of making it take longer?
> Some machine learning?
Never had a reason. I'll learn it if I ever have one. My usual approach to anything a whole bunch of people are doing, but I'm not, is to assume that some of them must be idiots, and they're doing OK, so, since I'm an idiot, I'll pick it up just fine, too—if I ever need to. This approach has yet to fail me. I've yet to try to do something new that lots of other people are doing and found that no, in fact I'm too dumb to pick it up pretty fast.
See above about needing someone who wants the output of my work, before I can reliably finish projects. There's no way I'm going to complete a "learning project" in machine learning, for its own sake, unless I'm just very interested in whatever's being learned—and I just don't really care that much about machine learning. I get the gist, so it's not some big mystery to me how it works, OK, that's neat. I'll dig deeper if I ever have even the slightest reason to. Just haven't yet.
> Data science?
Not done anything interesting, or "real" data science. Fixing up data, yes. Doing very simple math on it, sure. If I ever knew what any of these: "ANOVA, Chi Squared, Student T Tests" are I've long since forgotten. Certainly never used any.
Similar situation as GP and I have never made a game. Simply because it doesn't interest me in the slightest
I coded that kind of stuff when I was like 12, in BASIC, with no idea about integration as far as I can remember now. I think I'd read about simulating a bouncing ball in a basic programming book somewhere? This did help with getting the ideas about calculus later.
Added: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf has a more detailed scenario of kids coding Euler integration without knowing it's called that.
Velocity = Velocity + changes in velocity
Position = Position + Velocity
Do this on an infinite loop and That’s a numeric Euler integration of velocity to get position.
It’s not gatekeeping, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to make a game without credentials. I was a college dropout for almost a decade until three months ago. I was just saying that that is more advanced math than what a fifth grader does.
I am sorry that you think that it is absurd.
[edit] Wikipediaing "Euler integration", which redirects to "Euler method", it's not clear to me at all how knowing the stuff on that page (and it's Wikipedia, so nothing on the page looks like 5th grade math, even if it actually is) is particularly helpful with coming up with those two addition formulas.
[edit edit] I don't mean the tone of any of this to be hostile—it's so hard to convey tone in plain text—but I'm just legitimately not following how this is connected, except in a "well you could derive these two very simple things from a very powerful, more complex, general method that's useful for a bunch of other stuff too—there's no particular reason to, but you could" sort of way.
What makes this more complicated (and granted you might not be doing this if your goal is to clone Mario) is when you need to combine forces together. In that case, the change in velocity comes from acceleration, and the change in acceleration comes from the summation of forces in X and Y directions. Obviously the actual calculation is trivial, just simple arithmetic, but the knowledge of what's going on, and how to expand on it is not. If you wanted to make Joust, for example, you need to know all this stuff about forces, or at least I did when I cloned Joust a million years ago. I agree that Wikipedia has a way of complicating things, and it's possible that even without formal training in calculus that you would have rediscovered what I described, and that's totally fair, but that's still calculus! You're still doing calculus, you just didn't realize it at that point.
Of course if you need more accurate physics in your games (unlikely for a basic platformer), you would need to use a more advanced integration method, e.g. RK4 or Adams Bashforth.
I apologize if I came off slightly gatekeepey; I should be clear that I don't particularly care if you know the name of these methods. I'm just saying that these methods are calculus concepts, and as such having an understanding of calculus can help you with that.
> I apologize if I came off slightly gatekeepey; I should be clear that I don't particularly care if you know the name of these methods. I'm just saying that these methods are calculus concepts, and as such having an understanding of calculus can help you with that.
None of your posts bothered me at all. Appreciate the care, though.
I'm not a mathematician, but my understanding of them saying that is because that's more computation than mathematical thinking. You're not getting an understanding of what's actually happening when you've memorized 4x5=20, all you're doing is creating basic word-mapping.
Maybe I just lived a very different life, but even though I'm reasonably good with my times tables, I still almost always use a calculator/spreadsheet/spotlight/phone to do all but the most basic of computations. Why wouldn't I? I always have a supercomputer in my pocket that is substantially more likely to be correct than a twenty year old memory of fourth grade.
> I'd guess 99% of the math I use in a given year could be done by an average 5th grader.
I don't mean to come off as a jerk, but I guess I'm just going to say it; in the 25 years you've been a developer, have you not tried to make a game? Some machine learning? Data science?
I'm not saying you need to be the next Guass or anything, but all of those require more advanced math than what I was taught in fifth grade. To make a platformer game, you have to know enough to do a basic Euler integration. To do machine learning, you have to know enough to at least know what a Sigmoid is [1]. To do data science, you have to understand basic statistical methods (E.g. ANOVA, Chi Squared, Student T Tests). Maybe you were taught all this stuff in fifth grade, but I don't think that the majority of students where.
[1] I don't do machine learning for a living, I know that the Sigmoid has fallen out of favor but I think my point still stands.