How Do Bullets Work in Video Games?
Fun side note to this: although bullet collisions are trivial, <i>sword</i> collisions are genuinely computationally complex, in the sense that I’m not aware of a single publicly available game engine that ships with a robust real-time solver for sword-sword collisions.<p>I find this really interesting because it’s a complete inversion of reality, where bullet impacts are vastly more energetic and chaotic than sword clashes. It tells you something about the scale we play games at, maybe.<p>I don’t see people talking about it, but this has to be a huge part of why sword combat in video games is so much less explored and well-realized than gunfighting. Figuring out why it’s such a hard problem, and exploring the various workarounds and their limitations, is a fun weekend project if you know a little computational geometry. (And it’s probably the work of a few minutes if you know enough formal geometry, I guess.)