[tombert]

Sure, and I will admit that my example wasn't stupendous there (that's what I get for trying to reply on a phone).

What makes this more complicated (and granted you might not be doing this if your goal is to clone Mario) is when you need to combine forces together. In that case, the change in velocity comes from acceleration, and the change in acceleration comes from the summation of forces in X and Y directions. Obviously the actual calculation is trivial, just simple arithmetic, but the knowledge of what's going on, and how to expand on it is not. If you wanted to make Joust, for example, you need to know all this stuff about forces, or at least I did when I cloned Joust a million years ago. I agree that Wikipedia has a way of complicating things, and it's possible that even without formal training in calculus that you would have rediscovered what I described, and that's totally fair, but that's still calculus! You're still doing calculus, you just didn't realize it at that point.

Of course if you need more accurate physics in your games (unlikely for a basic platformer), you would need to use a more advanced integration method, e.g. RK4 or Adams Bashforth.

I apologize if I came off slightly gatekeepey; I should be clear that I don't particularly care if you know the name of these methods. I'm just saying that these methods are calculus concepts, and as such having an understanding of calculus can help you with that.

[handrous]

OK, I've got what you meant now. Makes sense.

> I apologize if I came off slightly gatekeepey; I should be clear that I don't particularly care if you know the name of these methods. I'm just saying that these methods are calculus concepts, and as such having an understanding of calculus can help you with that.

None of your posts bothered me at all. Appreciate the care, though.