What Math would be good to learn to making games??

just like the title say's.


I want to start making games well right now would love to make a game but not professional don't plan to sell it but would make a game just so I can learn how to make a game and experience it.


I also would like to know how to create sound effects and other stuff.

I notice gateway they had a program where you record your voice and you can change your voice from a male to female or any other voices.

I would love to learn how I can programming wise create sounds.

I know the music band slipknot they have 2 guys that are programmers and I have seen behind the seens what goes on.

the guy made a home made computer system that they put in a cart which goes on stage on top of the stage they have buttons and the programmer knows what buttons are for what sound.

So was wondering programming wise what can you do in the sound area??

Learn about vectors and matrices, you will hear a lot about those.

Look up the dotproduct and cross product, those are pretty ubiquitous.

For sound, well what you mentioned as an example doesn't exactly relate to game programming, but DirectSound, FMOD and OpenAL are audio libraries. A programming library is something that does stuff for you, in this case plays sounds and/or music. They also allow you to extract the frequencies of sound being played such that you can make a visual to go with it, e.g. with FMOD's getspectrum() function. One example of this'd be windows media player's visualizations that change shape/color with the music.

In 2d, almost every problem can be solved by interpolating between two vectors (well, not every, but im amazed over how often I use it)

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Originally Posted by BobMcGee123

Learn about vectors and matrices, you will hear a lot about those.

Look up the dotproduct and cross product, those are pretty ubiquitous.

For sound, well what you mentioned as an example doesn't exactly relate to game programming, but DirectSound, FMOD and OpenAL are audio libraries. A programming library is something that does stuff for you, in this case plays sounds and/or music. They also allow you to extract the frequencies of sound being played such that you can make a visual to go with it, e.g. with FMOD's getspectrum() function. One example of this'd be windows media player's visualizations that change shape/color with the music.

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Well I mean about the sound is creating your own sound effects or music.

it's part of sound programming and does involve in game programming subject.

I have heard super Mario uses sound programming to create the sound effects like when he jumps you hear a sound effect.

I would like to generate my own audio without using musical instruments or other stuff to create music or sound effects.

I was thinking more that with programming you can create your own sound wave and even edit the sound wave.

so like if I were to record my voice I can make my voice would like a girl or a chipmunk or a very low eviish sound ect.

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Originally Posted by hockey97

Well I mean about the sound is creating your own sound effects or music.

it's part of sound programming and does involve in game programming subject.

I have heard super Mario uses sound programming to create the sound effects like when he jumps you hear a sound effect.

I would like to generate my own audio without using musical instruments or other stuff to create music or sound effects.

I was thinking more that with programming you can create your own sound wave and even edit the sound wave.

so like if I were to record my voice I can make my voice would like a girl or a chipmunk or a very low eviish sound ect.

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There's a difference between "dealing with digitized data that represents a sound/voice/whatever" (like your chipmunk example) and "getting something to play out of a speaker". The former, in as much as you are representing data as some sort of mathematical object (in terms of a frequency function, an amplitude function, etc.) may or may not be easy to do programmatically. The latter involves hardware, which is a whole other kettle of fish, which is where the libraries come in. (The libraries may have transforms, too, I haven't looked at them really.)

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Well I mean about the sound is creating your own sound effects or music.

it's part of sound programming and does involve in game programming subject.

I have heard super Mario uses sound programming to create the sound effects like when he jumps you hear a sound effect.

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It sounds like you're talking about making sounds programatically and that wouldn't be practical. Honestly, if you dont plan on selling the game, or unless you're massively into making your own sound effects, I'd just take sounds from existing games and use those.

Older consoles basically had mini synths on chips that you could control via hardware registers to make sounds of a certain pitch, waveform, etc and set the attack and release and such.

So these machines had their own unique sounds. These days it's all sampled digital audio (made with real instruments/sequencers, etc).

http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy

^very good screencasts,so you really have no excuse not to learn mathematics

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It sounds like you're talking about making sounds programatically and that wouldn't be practical

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I think it would be practical for old 80's-style sound effects. OP: If you want to do that, study DSP.

Linear algebra, trigonometry and geometry are about it these days...

If you want something to move in a straight line at an arbitrary angle (i.e. not just the standard 8 ways) then x += (cos (ang) * distance) and y += (sin (ang) * distance).

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If you want something to move in a straight line at an arbitrary angle (i.e. not just the standard 8 ways) then x += (cos (ang) * distance) and y += (sin (ang) * distance).

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That works, but you can optimise it by storing direction and velocity as a vector. That way you only need to use trig functions when the angle changes.

Again I say this should be FAQ'ed

^totally agreed ^.^~

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Originally Posted by kypronite

http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy

^very good screencasts,so you really have no excuse not to learn mathematics

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Excellent linky.

For sound generation/effects you should read some book on DSP...It's really exciting having your own sound engine based on synthesis...you have full control on the sound. It can be dinamically adapted to the situation of the game ecc.

If you want you can use stk: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/stk/

have a read at this classic book (free!): http://www.dspguide.com/pdfbook.htm

anyway making a game based on sound files (like many games do) is much more simpler...so think about it.

Generating your own sound effects will fall well short of where you want your sound effects to be. Most games will use pre-recorded sounds and then post mix them using Sound Forge or something similar. Games that generate their sounds on the fly (such as driving games, flight sim games, etc.) often sound very fake. Test Drive Unlimited generates all their engine sounds and as a result they sound a bit unrealistic. Need for Speed uses pre-recorded sounds and then modifies them in game using pitch, reverb, etc, and they sound far better. I'm not downing TDU b/c overall it is a better game and overall experience but from a sound standpoint EA's NFS series kills Atari's TDU series (hopefully a series).

You can also compare Combat Flight Simulator 2 with Maddox's IL2 - 1946. IL2 1946 uses generated engine sound effects and while they are good they fall short. The cannons and gunfire on 1946 also are generated and are in dire need of help. CFS 2 and 3 I believe use pre-recorded sound effects. I also think that MS Flight Sim and MS Train Sim also use real world sound effects and they sound so much better.

Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 4, MOHA, MOHA: Pacific Assault, and MOHA: Airborne also use pre-recorded sound effects. Many of these games take a week or so to go out and record actual sound effects and the end result is fantastic. Your ears, just like your eyes, are very good at picking up on repetition. Your ears are as good at picking out sounds that just don't quite sound like their real world counterparts as your eyes are at picking out textures that don't look realistic enough.

Pre-recorded sounds fare much better in games than generated ones. I believe this is also one of the reasons that musical keyboards started to support real time sampling of sounds b/c the engineers knew that regardless of how good their sound algos were...they just didn't match up to their real world counterparts. DSP sound algos are very good at generating musical instrument sounds as has been evidenced by the minds at Creative, Yamaha, etc. But when it comes to real world sounds that are a combination of many many waveforms they just don't stand up.

The human brain is a hard beast to fool when it comes to sight and sound.

From an efficiency standpoint it does not make sense to me to spend a lot of cycles running through an algorithm to produce a waveform that is readily available in the real world and sounds better to boot.

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Originally Posted by mike_g

That works, but you can optimise it by storing direction and velocity as a vector. That way you only need to use trig functions when the angle changes.

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Direction and velocity could be scalar variables or a vector - it would definitely make sense to store the resulting X and Y deltas as a vector though (and only calculate when the angle changes).

In addition, store the sines in a lookup table (which would result in some quantisation of the angle you can travel in) - the cosine would then be the entry a quarter of the table size away from the sine. Much more efficient.

Of course, that's what I would do, but I was just outlining a principle in my previous example - it's up to the coder to take it and tailor it to their application.