I spend a good deal of time keeping up with the latest news in the world of computer games. They’re one of my bigger interests, and they’re a big reason why I chose to major in Computer Engineering. Despite that, I don’t usually talk about topical news much in this website — it generally has too short a shelf-life to be useful. But today something came up that spurred me to break this silence — Nintendo released a trailer for the new Pokémon games.
About a year or two ago, I stumbled across an interesting question asked by a user named 32koala on Reddit’s AskScience board: “Is light made of particles, or waves?” With my quantum physics course still in recent memory, and having thoroughly enjoyed Eliezer Yudkowsky’s excellent quantum physics sequence (on which this post is heavily based), I found that the answers the commenters had given didn’t quite elaborate or clarify things enough for my liking. I asked people if they wanted a more thorough explanation, and after receiving several comments from people expressing their interest, I gave it to them. In my perennial tradition of not wanting to half-ass things, it ended up being even longer than I expected and I spent a lot of time afterwards answering questions to the best of my ability at the time. It got a reasonable amount of attention for the day, and I got comments saying that it deserved a better home than a comment buried in the depths of a Reddit thread.
It took over a year, but I’ve finally followed through that suggestion. I’ve cleaned it up slightly from its initial version, but for the most part the content is similar to the original Reddit comment.
One of my “favourite” methods of procrastinating from schoolwork is with webcomics.
Source: XKCD
It’s far too often that when confronted with that quiz I have to study for, or that problem set that needs solving, or that assignment that I really shouldn’t be leaving to the last minute, I’ll instead take a “short break”, come across some new and interesting webcomic, and find myself hooked, clicking through its many-year-long archive one page at a time.
But this isn’t a story about procrastination. That’s just the backdrop. The story I want to tell is one of an interesting contrast, of “magic”, and of talent.
Yesterday I went out to see the cherry blossoms that had come into full bloom at High Park.
Last time, I showed you the simple but effective physics system that powered Lucky Shot. By the end of the article, we had a smooth, adjustable, and flexible movement system that we could apply to each of the AI enemies. I also mentioned that the physics system took care of most of the natural-feeling movement of the game’s enemies, and that the underlying AI was comparatively simple. This is what I’ll be showing you in this article — how the physics and AI worked in tandem.