hehehe ... was wondering .... what does CS stand for ... english is my second language and im not really into the educational structure in other countries.

CS is Computer Science

The math the you really need is trigonometry. You almost definitly need to have tken physics, unless you want to try and derive the formulas all on your own, stuff that took many highly skilled people years. If you were to get into more complex stuff like reflections on a curved surface, then you would need some calculus, like taking derivatives. Derivates are used to find the slope of a curve at a single point, something pretty hard to do considering that you need two points to find the slope of a line. The derivative (or slope, whatever you want to call it) also represents rate of change, ie acceleration being the rate of change in velocity, or velocity being the rate of change in displacement.
Here is a list of math and sciences to study:
Algebra 1+2 (The base for the rest)
Geometry (helps especially with thought process and problem solving)
Trigonometry (need to fully understand those trig functions and vectors)
some Calculus (rate of change, putting everything together)
Classical Physics (the stuff that deals with the macro world, not the micro)
Chemistry (Background, so you know what goes boom and what doesn''t)
Some Quantum Physics (Light is some pretty strange stuff, and classical physics sucks at explaining it, though many classical physics books today switch to the quantum view when dealing with light)

I can''t think of anything else right now. I have to go, got Calculus class to go to. If I think of anything else, I will post again.

I thought of a few more things to study.
Grammar! (You will definitley be adding text to the game, nothing is worse than bad grammar)
Art (for design, color schemes. It also helps with visualization, seeing a problems shape before attacking it.)

Study grammar and rhetoric, rhetoric is the art of persuasion, i.e. getting your point across without boring the player. I can''t stand it when I see a game (or anything else for that matter) with a grammatical error. If you are serious about your game, make it as clear and concise as possible. Nobody wants to listen to the story drag on, they want to play the game.
Study many kinds of art also, from visual to audio. Study sketching for design aspects and modeling techniques, study painting for color coordination. Study music theory for the music in the game. Their is a new game out for the Sony Playstation called MTV Music Generator. It makes making music easy (though it isn''t protable). If you''ve studied music theory, it makes it even easier.
Finally, study everything else that you can. In the real world, you can''t be totally focused on making games. You can speciallize in games, but you need to have some idea of what else there is in the world. Study history, economics (especially), and other things. Be a well rounded person.

Studying just the things for game programming is good. However, it's a good idea to have some slack when it comes to education. Someone here said that Universities let you study Phsics, Pure and Applied Mathematics and Discrete Mathematics because you'll never know what you'll be doing once you graduate. I mean you might turn out to be a programmer for a physics research team or for a biologist etc.

Studying ang getting the degree(s) is the easy part. Actual programming (or engineering etc.) requires problem solving skills. You'll be amazed at how people say programming is hard when all they lack is a sense of organization or procedure when it comes to problems. You must have a systematic approach when dealing with problems. This is where practicing solving problems help you develop your techniques. Practicing exposes you to different types of problems and teaches you how to go about with them in real life. By practicing you won't have to memorize theories, techniques and so on, because you'll know them by heart.

Edited by - Fourier on 2/27/00 8:02:49 AM

I was wondering what''s the CS curriculum overseas, here''s from my college:

1st Grade :

* Analitic Geometry.
* Calculus ( Differential and Integral ).
* Computing Introduction ( should be called " Programing in C ").
* General and Experimental Physics.
* Algorithms
* Logic

2nd Grade :

* Linear Algebra
* Data Structures
* Programming Lab (OOP Programming)
* Assembly
* Mathematical Analisis
* Numerical Calculus ( I don''t know if it''s named like this in english, it''s about Curve Adjust, Numerical Integration (Simpsons metod) and etc)
* Verbal Expression ( I, a CS bachelor must know how to speak and write well LOL ).
* Introduction to Electronics.

3rd Grade

* Discrete Math
* Database
* Advanced Computing Topics ( Graphical Computing )
* Computer Arquitecture
* Financial Math
* O.S.
* Statistc
* Hardware

4th Grade

* Compilers
* Data Comunication Engenniering
* Comercial Programming
* Artificial Intelligence
* Mathematical Programming
* Advanced Data Processing Topics

well, that''s my college''s curriculum, I think there''s some things that might be usefull to games programming, and all these disciplines ennhance your "way of think", and that can''t be bad to game programing.

Hope this post is not too large

My take on the matter is that all that you NEED to know for programming games is some basic algebra. The bulk of the math that you''ll do with 2D games is adding and subtracting (at least it better be if you want your programs to run on normal systems), so knowing how to reverse-engineer formulas is imperative.

Next to that, a good understanding of binary arithmetic is important (knowing how AND, OR, XOR and shifts affect numbers).

The third-most important to know is trig. Doing 2D vector-based caclulations is totally dependent upon knowing your sine from your cosine

The higher-level math you won''t need until you go into 3D, and you probably shouldn''t make it a requirement to know until then.

Some of the items included therein (sets and matrices) are useful for programming, but you can probably learn about them without going through 5 years of CS.

-Chris

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Chris Rouillard
Software Engineer
crouilla@hotmail.com