I've been making games for a while now, and one of the things I use often are vectors. Not the Flash 10 Vectors (types arrays) but linear algebraic Vectors. I was curious if anyone else used them as well, or if there was something similar that you use?
Using them in what way? Physics calculations or graphic rendering? Just about everyone uses them in a game with any sort of physics involvement, whether they know it or not.
Hmm, a relatively large part of what I do at work involves Euclidean vectors, however I am also familiar with Coordinate vectors. Not sure how much help I would be to someone wanting to design a game, but I am familiar with the solving of the equations, if that's any help.
Vectors and other trig-related stuff is just way too useful not to use.
Dank mentioned the obvious physics-related usage, but I wanted to clarify that it's useful even in "quick and dirty" physics. For example, if I'm doing a Pong-style ball bouncing, vectors are the way to go for storing the ball's movement. In that case, you'd want to store the vector as a vx and vy component (rather than as angle and magnitude) since you use the vx and vy values on every tick to update the ball's position.
Anyway, I keep meaning to make a proper vector class, but I just haven't gotten around to it. The problem is that the math is simply enough that I find myself just quickly creating vx and vy member variables on the object that I'm working with, and it's only later that I realize I've rewritten several vector manipulation functions (rotate it while keeping the magnitude, make an absolute change in the magnitude while keeping the angle, and make a relative change in the magnitude while keeping the angle, and so forth).
Also, even with non-physics and non-vector stuff, I still find trig functions insanely useful. It's been about 15 years since I went over this stuff in school, and I still find myself mapping things out in terms of right triangles with hypotenuses that're radii of a unit circle. Between atan2, cos, and sin, you can construct some very nice graphics.
For example, my most recent project involves making an LCD-type display. The individual segments are shaped like rectangles with triangles on the ends. I wound up creating a nifty generalized drawing routine that creates the shape given two endpoints (the tips of the triangles on each end) and the segment width. First, I compute the angle of the line with atan2. Then I find the other points in the triangle (which are also the corners of the rectangle) by treating them as if they were points on a unit circle. For the triangle on the other end, I just add 180 degrees (well, technically Pi since it's in radians) to the angle and repeat the process. Makes things work out great.
