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Christer Ericson
Personal blog · realtimecollisiondetection.net/blogprogramminggamesmath
Christer Ericson's personal blog at realtimecollisiondetection.net covers programming, games and math. Since 2008, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “Game industry salaries from the 2009 H1-B database”. The last post was in 2011, but the archive is still widely read.
37mentions?
28HN people?
2008–2025first – last linked?
Companion website for the book Real-Time Collision Detection by Christer Ericson
Most-linked posts?
- Game industry salaries from the 2009 H1-B database4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-02-21
- /3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-01-19
- Design patterns are spoonfeed material for brainless programmers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-09-24
- /books/rtcd/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-11-19
- /blog/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-01-19
- ACM censors linking2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-11-21
- Don’t follow the shortest path2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-05-28
- Game Developer Salaries From H1-B Data2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-07-19
What Hacker News says?
Completely disagree - convex collision detection is a neatly solved problem. SAT [0] is implementable in a couple of hours, and GJK [1] is a really neat algorithm that takes a ltitle more than SAT to implement. For optimising collision detection there's some spatial partitioning [2] algorithms that work really well. The gnarly stuff comes in when you're trying to figure out contact points and impulse responses and a…
Comment linking /pubs/SIGGRAPH04_Ericson_GJK_notes.pdf
on “2D Rigid Body Collision Resolution”Submitted ACM censors linking as a story · 38 points
HN discussionYeah, that's why I loved that industry. A million hard problems to solve. Along that lines Real Time Collusion Detection[1] is solid gold for a lot of these types of spatial issues. It's basically data structures for gamedev. Aside from the fun problems the rest of that industry can die in a fire. The basic business model is to prey on people's passion so that they pour themselves into the job for 3-5 years and then…
Comment linking /
on “How to Make a Roguelike”- ks · 2008-09-22
Submitted Advanced bit manipulation-fu as a story · 22 points
HN discussion Interestingly you can find a lot of good tips in the optimization section of 'Realtime Collision Detection ' https://realtimecollisiondetection.net/
Comment linking /
on “C++ patterns for low-latency applications including high-frequency trading”Submitted Game Developer Salaries From H1-B Data as a story · 21 points
HN discussionIf you dig this stuff then Real-Time Collision Detection[1] is solid gold. It's basically data structures for 3D along with a practical appreciate of what makes real world algorithms fast(data layout). [1] http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/books/rtcd/
Comment linking /books/rtcd/
on “Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews”Submitted Don’t follow the shortest path as a story · 6 points
HN discussionPure gold, indeed. It is a very important reference book (can be found in Amazon both new and used), not only for collision detection, but also for space partition, geometry, code optimization, etc. Also, the author has an amazing blog in the web page of the book: http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Books I used to develop a game engine”Submitted Design Patterns are from Hell! as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI just looked if there was a newer version of it. There doesn't seem to be, but Christer Ericson does still have a dedicated page for the book. The errata section[0] is surprisingly small given that it is 632 pages. I thought this snippet was interesting: > All illustrations in the book were redrawn from my original illustrations. Unfortunately, the company in charge of redrawing the illustrations mangled almost all…
Comment linking /pubs/
on “Books I used to develop a game engine”Submitted Design patterns are spoonfeed material for brainless programmers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSame way you don't render the whole world each frame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentially_visible_set Also 3D data structures, which http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/ is still my go-to book.
Comment linking /
on “The One Man MMO Project”Submitted Game industry salaries from the 2009 H1-B database as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOne of my favorite books is Real-Time Collision Detection[1] which covers this and other adjacent topics(like cache line aware data structures!). I generally refer to it as "data structures for 2D/3D" and I think only the Art of Electronics has more value on a page-by-page basis for the domains I've enjoyed. [1] https://realtimecollisiondetection.net/books/rtcd/
Comment linking /books/rtcd/
on “Collision Detection (2015)”Submitted Design patterns are from hell^2 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionVery nice! A very good resource on collision detection is the book by Christer Ericson (2005). However it is more geared towards c++ realtime games. https://realtimecollisiondetection.net/ I appreciate this nice site too.
Comment linking /
on “Collision Detection (2015)”Submitted A* Search with Non-Admissible Heuristics as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> logically less work Is it? If you're excluding memory access then I would argue it's not a proper representation of the work performed. You can have an algorithm that's mathematically ideal but from an engineering perspective is the wrong choice. Also your workload doesn't always define if you fit in/out of cache. Linear access algorithms will scale on any architecture/cache size as the pre-fetcher will step in an…
Comment linking /books/rtcd/
on “Gallery of Processor Cache Effects”Submitted A scalar triple product identity as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA sphere-frustum check is a lot cheaper than a box-frustum check. The spherical test only has to check the distance of a single point to the frustum, a box intersection test is much more complex. There are some false positives, but as with many things in game development 'close enough' usually works pretty well. If you're really concerned with efficiency you should look into other data structures than an octree. Oct…
Comment linking /books/rtcd/
on “Let's Code... an MMO”Submitted Design patterns are from hell (2008) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt predates dolphin's use of it, though don't ask me by how long. Here's a reference to the term from 2008: https://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=73
Comment linking /blog/?p=73
on “RT64: N64 graphics renderer in emulators and native ports”http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=107 Christer Ericsson, a tech director at Sony Santa Monica (God of War) has pulled out all the figures for game developers a few times. As a point of reference, in my experience, game developer salaries tend to be ~10% higher than a similar role at Microsoft/Google/Apple but with poorer benefits.
Comment linking /blog/?p=107
on “Protip for salary seekers: H1-B filings are public”As far as I know, salaries are included in H1B visa database. Ah, here's the article where somebody mined it for game developer salary: http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=107
Comment linking /blog/?p=107
on “Google Makes Massive Counteroffers To Retain Employees”Christer Ericson's book "Real-time Collision Detection" covers all this and much, much more in a very readable (IMO) fashion. The companion website for the book is at http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/ and the blog on that site can be just as invaluable a source of information as the book itself.
Comment linking /
on “How I implemented 2D collision detection in Pistol Slut”A few years ago when I needed to write collision detection for a variety of specialized cases, I found the book "Real-Time Collision Detection". It is one of the few really comprehensive resources I was able to find on the topic. The example sources are C++ but the concepts apply to 3d in any domain. The website for the book is http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/
Comment linking /
on “HTML5 games: 3D collision detection”I answer this question over and over on Reddit. So, here’s a wall of text for you :) Here's the list of links I give everyone getting started in graphics programming in general. The main thing you need to know is https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/smart/ OpenGL is a good API to start with. There's a lot to learn regardless of which API you use. Once you can do an animated character in a scene with lighting, sh…
Comment linking /blog/?p=86
on “Ask HN: Resources for Learning Graphics Programming”I always give my students these to read when I teach design patterns :-) https://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=44 http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=81 "The “Design Patterns” book is one of the worst programming books ever. Yes, really. I’m 100% dead serious when I say that I think it has set (and will continue to set) the progress of software development back by decades."
Comment linking /blog/?p=81
on “Design patterns let you apply existing solutions to your code”'Fast' is a poor descriptive choice for a library that was clearly written without attention paid to CPU performance characteristics, GPU performance characteristics, or the nature of modern Canvas implementations. EDIT: A quick glance at the sample game 'O!' in the chrome profiler shows that it is triggering a garbage collection roughly every second. Pretty bad for a game with such low scene complexity and renderin…
Comment linking /blog/?p=86
on “CutJS – Fast 2D HTML5 rendering engine for game development”
