Trigger Happy
90
the ball bounced off the bat obeyed the basic law “angle
of incidence equals angle of reflection.” Approach a
stationary bat at an angle of forty-five degrees, and
you’ll leave it at the same angle. Elementary stuff.
Similarly, Asteroids enjoyed a smattering of physics
modeling in the fact that your spacecraft had inertia:
you carried on moving across the screen even when
your engines stopped firing. And mastering this inertial
control system (later refined and made much trickier in
games like Thrust) was part of what made the game so
enjoyably challenging. Now processor speeds are such
that ever more tiny variables can be computed “on the
fly”—near instantaneously, as and when required—to
give the player a sense of interacting with objects that
behave just as they would in the real world.
At the vanguard of physics modeling is a company
called Mathengine. Their airy, relaxed Oxford
headquarters is crammed with casual young
mathematicians and physicists gazing intently at the
screens of muscular computers. One displays a crude
wireframe representation, in blocky green lines, of a
human calf and foot. “Modeling a simple ankle joint,”
the programmer confides. This sort of thing will soon
have applications in, for instance, soccer games: the
