MIT Linear Algebra OpenCourseWare

Twitter AI Class Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 1 When I posted about decals last week, a number of readers commented that they would be interested in posts about linear algebra as it applies to game development. I decided if I'm going to write about that, I might as well start at the beginning! This will be review to many of you who have written games before or taken classes in kinematic physics, so please bear with me for this introductory post -- I will get to more advanced topics later. Why do we care about linear algebra? Linear algebra is the study of vectors. What is a vector? In games, vectors are used to store positions, directions, and velocities. The position vector indicates that the man is standing two meters east of the origin, and one meter north. As you can see, a vector by itself is just a set of numbers -- it is only given meaning by its context. For this reason, it's important to keep track of your units. Now that we've gone over the basics of vectors, we need to know how to use them. Vector addition Vector subtraction