Trigger Happy
the ball bounced off the bat obeyed the basic law “angle of incidence equals angle of reflection.” Approach a stationary bat at an angle of forty-five degrees, and you’ll leave it at the same angle. Elementary stuff. Similarly, Asteroids enjoyed a smattering of physics modeling in the fact that your spacecraft had inertia: you carried on moving across the screen even when your engines stopped firing. And mastering this inertial control system (later refined and made much trickier in games like Thrust) was part of what made the game so enjoyably challenging. Now processor speeds are such that ever more tiny variables can be computed “on the fly”—near instantaneously, as and when required—to give the player a sense of interacting with objects that behave just as they would in the real world.
At the vanguard of physics modeling is a company called Mathengine. Their airy, relaxed Oxford headquarters is crammed with casual young mathematicians and physicists gazing intently at the screens of muscular computers. One displays a crude wireframe representation, in blocky green lines, of a human calf and foot. “Modeling a simple ankle joint,” the programmer confides. This sort of thing will soon have applications in, for instance, soccer games: the
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