What are the use cases for calculating slope?

[Cam]

Where I think I’m going to struggle with this course is how to apply what I’m learning to help make it stick. I was able to work my way through the challenge easily enough but came out of the video not knowing when I’d ever use that (it seems we’re searching for a completely different value to trigonometry and pythagorus!).

Would it be possible to abstract this out for maths-challenged people like myself so we can create a cheatsheet of sorts to refer back to? Examples of video game scenarios would be tops, even if it were explained via gameplay footage that gets paused and annotated over.

Thank you!

[Nina]

Hi Cam,

In which course are you?

[Bryant_Schaper]

I’m assuming you’re in the math course. And if so, some of it may not directly apply to game development all the time. Specifically when you ask about calculating slope, I could see applications in 2D games, Or as this is not specific to a game and Jen what if you wanted to build your own game engine?

[Cam]

Oh my gosh. Sorry, Nina. This reply slipped right by me. Yes, I’m doing the Maths course, I’m not sure why it didn’t have a tag!

I’m back working my way through this Maths course now that the content has picked up again with Gary and my point still stands that it’d be super useful for dummies like me to see these concepts shown in real games we can relate to!

[Nina]

Don’t worry, Cam. I’ve added the tag for you.

Since this thread is already fairly old, I don’t know if @garypettie saw your request. With the @, he hopefully will.

[garypettie]

Hi Cam, I totally missed your original message (I wasn’t a tutor at the time).

Throughout the course we try to build on past successes. So if you’re watching a lecture and you’re not quite sure when it will be useful, then there’s a good chance that we’ll be expanding on those skills later in the course.

The first 2 sections in particular are more about getting you comfortable manipulating numbers and formulas, so that you can use all of these techniques when it comes to things like solving trig problems and working with vectors.

We’ve tried to add some short gameplay clips at the start or end of the lectures (especially from section 3 onward) to help illustrate where a particular lecture topic might be used.

[Cam]

Thanks, @garypettie and @Nina. I look forward to pushing through! Hopefully you can deliver me to the promised lands of mathematical competency!