From Quaternion Mathematics to Meaning: Longing to Know and Be Known

Discussion with Stephen Hurn, Software Engineer for 18 years. Now working on Game Design and Writing, stay at home Dad. This episode is also on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/Di_vUSQw-J0

The design process for video games.

Levels you operate in. Mechanics (the interaction with the user) up through Dynamics to aesthetic. Aesthetic (idea) informs the process and gets communicated through mechanics. That's the meaning layer.

Quaternion Mathematics, 3-D software, triangles and measures

Code is like a plan for the house. The computer builds the house based on the plan. Computer hardware is the atom level (Intel and AMD have different hardware, but a level up they can talk to each other) Each level up is to solve different kinds of problems.

Hardware is converted to electrical signals, displaying the image on the screen. The level of the user interacting is the most important level. That's where the meaning is. Materialists think you can go from the bottom up, but the top level is the most important. User centric view in software.

Every artist wants to communicate. The things you do are an attempt to communicate what you are seeing to the rest of the world.

Accuracy. The God object - an anti-pattern. Software engineers follow patterns that become apparent in the world much as mathematicians see mathematics already there in the universe that can be used by us. There are good and bad ways to write code. Actual patterns emerge from the languages themselves and the way they interact with the hardware.

There are better ways (preferred ways) to map the higher level to the lower level. There are divine patterns, and then there are evil patterns. The focus on accuracy or simplicity gives you a code that is as simple as it needs to be but no simpler. On the other side is the one great piece of code that fails because it is so convoluted and twisted that you can fix one bug and three more appear. Equivalent to the Tower of Babel. Too big not to fail.

Don't touch it. It's likely to break. If you break it, it's hard to fix. Code is written for programmers to understand. The computer, on the other hand, will run (execute) anything it's been programmed with.

Excellent coding book: Design Patterns: The Big Four