jMonkeyEngine -- how much Math do I need to know?

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

So I recently began to learn OpenGL – you know, just to grasp the concepts. But however patient I am, I think that manually setting up a little engine to ease the pain of rendering stuff is simply tedious – in other words, I want to deal with the exciting part of game development. I am well-versed with the basics of OpenGL and vaguely understand how things work behind the scenes. However, I still want to learn 3D maths. I’m a weird person – most people I know abhor Mathematics and don’t want anything to do with it. I love Maths and I want to do more of it. I want to use jMonkeyEngine because it’s a high-level API for making games, but I believe a programmer’s genius lies in his use of Mathematics. I’m hoping jMonkeyEngine won’t take the beauty of Mathematics and logical thinking out of the development process. Can anyone confirm whether Mathematical knowledge and 3D concepts are required to program games with jMonkeyEngine?

Any answer is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance :smiley:

#2

JMonkey will definitely help you with the exciting aspect of development.

It will also allow you to experiment in any way you can imagine. Since it includes a hefty suite of features, and is open source, you will be able to learn a lot very fast.

Whenever I’m in doubt I look at it’s source code xP.

#3

If you’re wondering what math you need to know to program games, the answer is not allot. You should learn how linear algebra plays into graphics in games, the difference between world, object, and view space, trigonometry and that’s about it.

Gonna need some more information first, before I give you recommendations. What kind of maths do you know from school (by topic)? How much graphics dev. have you done before? Have you ever 3D modeled before?

#4

@Ecumene

To answer your questions, I don’t know a lot of Mathematics, because I just started high school/secondary school. But because I’m into programming, I know a little more Maths than what I’ve learnt from school: namely, trigonometry, basic vector maths, 2D/3D Cartesian coordinates, a little bit of coordinate geometry and some matrix maths. I can’t list what I’ve learnt from school because that would be too much, but I can assure you that I know linear algebra.

I started programming roughly 3 years ago, but the first 2 years wasn’t serious programming, just playing around with various programming languages. This year I really started spending my free time almost entirely on programming. I learnt LWJGL a month ago from ThinMatrix, so I haven’t done a lot of graphics programming. I can use Blender pretty well (modifiers, sculpting, blah blah) and I made a couple of stuff. I even tried making a castle once, but I had to scrap it because I messed up the staircase :stuck_out_tongue:

From what you said, linear algebra and trigonometry is important in game dev. I’m pretty good at both. I wrote a getLineOfSight() using the parametric equation for generating circles (it involves trigonometry). However, I didn’t exactly ask for how much maths I need to know to program games. I was asking how much mathematical knowledge is required to make games in JME specifically, so…yeah.

#5

[quote=“ShadedVertex,post:4,topic:55897”]
Have you tried making a game first, then going from there? Honestly it depends on the type of game and all. If you’re following a tutorial and you don’t know anything about what they are doing, you can go off a tangent and learn it.

If you already understand where & how to use trig, and linear algebra then you’re pretty much set.

In short, start making games and go from there.