It still feels great to play! I love the history too, it's actually a great example of why prototyping "toys" is so important in product development. It allows you to play with isolated concepts without baggage or the expectation to make things production grade. Just getting straight to the point.
I think the fractal solver is bugged, but maybe I am just using it wrong. It says placing a cone in the red zone will block the vehicle, but either the colors are inverted or the backend is off, because everything is red except a few spots.
Otherwise very fun. I managed to park a truck the solver called impossible :)
I'm sorry, I really want to like and understand this, but the diagrams are worthless and mostly incomprehensible.
I would've liked to understand more about why it works the way it does, how it achieved the correct feel etc, not just regurgitate whatever the code does.
I would've liked to know more about how the author achieved what they did, not a blog post anyone with an llm could've written.
Interesting that he namechecks Thrust from 1986, an absolutely amazing game for the BBC Model B, and I guess the first 'physics' game I ever encountered. The 'towing' physics were amazing.
If you accelerate the Car, then switch the configuration from Car to Brick, the brick won't slow down.
Not sure whether is it intended but it feels wrong.
>One weekend in late August 1996, I wrote a 2D physics simulation which later became the basis of the vehicle system in the eventually popular game "Grand Theft Auto" aka "GTA".
I don't mean to be... judgemental, but if you had the talent to go something like this, why devolve on the remake? One could think that a person with your level of skill would be one of the main vanguard for hand coding. Again, I don't want to be too judgemental, as I am not a great programmer and use assisted tools when planning and designing personal apps, but I am just curious.
Why needlessly do extra work when it's easier than ever before to modernize what is already made? Why would he want to be a vanguard for "hand coding"?
So often it feels like people lose track of the actual conversation happening in the comments in favor of posting a cute quip for points...
This thread originated with one poster expressing disappointment that someone of the author's acumen would choose this path, and another poster asked why the author (or someone of their skills) should have chosen a different path. I weighed in with an answer to that question.
Obviously the author did not see things the way I suggested, or else the conversation would not have happened.
I've been a developer for not nearly as long as the author but long enough that at some point it felt like I was writing the same code and same abstractions over and over again and sometimes a new novel problem would reinvigorate my love of programming but today I'm happy to let an LLM write the tedious code while I give the more fun high level architectural direction and when reviewing the code sometimes I'll give it a nudge in a different direction. I suspect the author has written code like the 2d car physics many times over. Just my 2 cents.
I'd say you're fully off the mark here. That page contains serious architectural insight on how to make a "designed" car feeling work within a "physically correct" collision engine. Getting the balance right is super hard and he explains how to do it. I'm confident no AI could do that architecture, so this is most likely hours of hard work with a thin layer of LLM gloss on top.
No, I don't want to see the prompt. Yes it has some llm tics, but it's clear that he went back and forth before arriving at this. Why would I be interested in the transcript?
yes and? someone sharing the details of an extremely popular project is super cool. comments like this will not encourage more people to share more cool things.
I'd be ecstatic if more people used AI to share more cool things they've done. that'd be awesome. more of this blog post please.
But very little of the author shines through here, at least after the intro. I, too, would like to hear more about how someone built stuff, but this is not it.
It still feels great to play! I love the history too, it's actually a great example of why prototyping "toys" is so important in product development. It allows you to play with isolated concepts without baggage or the expectation to make things production grade. Just getting straight to the point.
Great story, programming and mechanics.
This is what taught me how to do handbrake turns.
And shortly after I learned how expensive tyres were, I stopped doing handbrake turns.
GTA didn't exist back then, so I had to learn them from the lore.
And shortly afterwards, in addition to all the different physics-in-action experience, I learned about how car insurance excess works.
no dynamics model (uses bicycle model) but i built a solver for parking
http://truckslop.joshu.dev/
That was a lot of fun to play with.
I think the fractal solver is bugged, but maybe I am just using it wrong. It says placing a cone in the red zone will block the vehicle, but either the colors are inverted or the backend is off, because everything is red except a few spots.
Otherwise very fun. I managed to park a truck the solver called impossible :)
Note: Using safari on an iPad of that matters.
[delayed]
This is pretty fun!
I'm sorry, I really want to like and understand this, but the diagrams are worthless and mostly incomprehensible.
I would've liked to understand more about why it works the way it does, how it achieved the correct feel etc, not just regurgitate whatever the code does.
I would've liked to know more about how the author achieved what they did, not a blog post anyone with an llm could've written.
Interesting that he namechecks Thrust from 1986, an absolutely amazing game for the BBC Model B, and I guess the first 'physics' game I ever encountered. The 'towing' physics were amazing.
https://youtu.be/Dt44PEIWBRg?is=CbVTRyDfo8Nt56fH
Thrust was by Jeremy C. Smith who went on to work on Exile with Peter Irvin
Nostalgic!
It'd be amazing to hook is up with the engine sound simulator: https://github.com/ange-yaghi/engine-sim
If you accelerate the Car, then switch the configuration from Car to Brick, the brick won't slow down. Not sure whether is it intended but it feels wrong.
Even that little simulation is really fun. I’d like to play a little 2D game with this mechanic.
AI content.
Really nice. GTA 1 & 2 were really amazing. I had a lot of good times with them.
I liked your idea. It was really cool.
>One weekend in late August 1996, I wrote a 2D physics simulation which later became the basis of the vehicle system in the eventually popular game "Grand Theft Auto" aka "GTA".
I don't mean to be... judgemental, but if you had the talent to go something like this, why devolve on the remake? One could think that a person with your level of skill would be one of the main vanguard for hand coding. Again, I don't want to be too judgemental, as I am not a great programmer and use assisted tools when planning and designing personal apps, but I am just curious.
Why needlessly do extra work when it's easier than ever before to modernize what is already made? Why would he want to be a vanguard for "hand coding"?
Sometimes the reward lies in the doing, not in the done.
And for that same reason people knit their own scarves but they don't expect the scarf they see at the store to be hand knit.
He's already done the doing.
Yes, I recall well the famous words of Claude Monet: "Well, I painted one scene of water lilies. That should be more than enough for a lifetime."
And sometimes not.
Seems the author chose option 2 and focused on the article instead.
So often it feels like people lose track of the actual conversation happening in the comments in favor of posting a cute quip for points...
This thread originated with one poster expressing disappointment that someone of the author's acumen would choose this path, and another poster asked why the author (or someone of their skills) should have chosen a different path. I weighed in with an answer to that question.
Obviously the author did not see things the way I suggested, or else the conversation would not have happened.
I've been a developer for not nearly as long as the author but long enough that at some point it felt like I was writing the same code and same abstractions over and over again and sometimes a new novel problem would reinvigorate my love of programming but today I'm happy to let an LLM write the tedious code while I give the more fun high level architectural direction and when reviewing the code sometimes I'll give it a nudge in a different direction. I suspect the author has written code like the 2d car physics many times over. Just my 2 cents.
d doesn't turn right for me, but shift+d does. Arrow keys do work though.
Feels like the original, just need some thing to run over.
It's an interesting project, although not a physics expert I am so curious what the original version looked like!
I'd say you're fully off the mark here. That page contains serious architectural insight on how to make a "designed" car feeling work within a "physically correct" collision engine. Getting the balance right is super hard and he explains how to do it. I'm confident no AI could do that architecture, so this is most likely hours of hard work with a thin layer of LLM gloss on top.
No, I don't want to see the prompt. Yes it has some llm tics, but it's clear that he went back and forth before arriving at this. Why would I be interested in the transcript?
Pangram says the first half is human and second half is gen AI.
Ran out of steam, I guess...
yes and? someone sharing the details of an extremely popular project is super cool. comments like this will not encourage more people to share more cool things.
I'd be ecstatic if more people used AI to share more cool things they've done. that'd be awesome. more of this blog post please.
But very little of the author shines through here, at least after the intro. I, too, would like to hear more about how someone built stuff, but this is not it.