> Fun side note to this: although bullet collisions are trivial, sword 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.
That's not a sense in which you can determine the computational complexity of the problem. Perhaps accurate sword combat just isn't very fun. Maybe it makes convincing animation much harder. Maybe it makes controlling the character much harder. Maybe you just don't know that many games. There are plenty reasons that it might be true that no games that you know of shipped with a robust real-time solver for sword-sword collisions other than computational complexity.
> 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.
Of course the modelling of bullets is also usually extremely simplified in video games. If there is anything we can learn from this I think it's that players prefer games to be predictable and controllable over them being perfectly realistic.
That's not a sense in which you can determine the computational complexity of the problem. Perhaps accurate sword combat just isn't very fun. Maybe it makes convincing animation much harder. Maybe it makes controlling the character much harder. Maybe you just don't know that many games. There are plenty reasons that it might be true that no games that you know of shipped with a robust real-time solver for sword-sword collisions other than computational complexity.
> 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.
Of course the modelling of bullets is also usually extremely simplified in video games. If there is anything we can learn from this I think it's that players prefer games to be predictable and controllable over them being perfectly realistic.