Let’s say you have a strong logic, know how to do a lot of things, but when it comes to systems that require Math, will there always be workarounds?, Or you would be forced to learn?, Assuming you don’t even know how to multiply, or the most basic operations, meaning that all the math functions in luau are non-existant to you, What are your opinions on this?
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generally the most complicated math you would be doing in normal scripting anyway is high school algebra
but lets assume that you don’t even know how to do 1+1. in which case, you probably wouldn’t even be able to do a basic 2017 tycoon, let alone anything of any mechanical depth because almost all game mechanics require incrementing a number at some point. in which case, i would be terrified on how that person even managed to get past second grade!
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well considering that computers are pretty much just really complicated calculators
probably not.
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I mean, its possible to technically not use algebra in programming your game. But programming at its core is logic and problem solving, which is the same for math.
Even if you don’t use math 1+1, math.abs(5*(-2)), you game will still be filled with math behind the scenes, and not being able to understand how it works wouldnt get you far with your experience as many many systems require basic math (Player movement, lighting, modeling, etc.)
Did you even… take a single computer science course?
Mostly not, but most of the math is relatively simple, and there’s guides by extremely smart people out there, so you should be fine
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Now with LLMs yes, before LLMs yes for most things.
The reason LLMs work so well for math related tasks is that most (if not all) the issues you will ever encounter when writing code have already been encountered many years before, and solved. Unless of course you are doing something absurd. Even if you think that the problem you face has no answer out there it most likely can be reformed to an already solved problem (for example many math problems can often be reformed in such a way so graph theory can be applied to them). If you are stuck you can also do the old trick of splitting a problem to smaller parts and solving them individually (as a means of simplification, this can also help the LLM because it tends to do well with smaller tasks).
For example if lets say I want to write an image parser, for example JPEG (so it reads image bytecode from HttpService and converts it to readable pixels in a buffer to show on a UI) I can simply tell the LLM to split the task into many smaller problems, and ask it to solve each problem individually and verify its solution. Then I can feed it back all the small parts it solved and ask it to combine them in a single working module. All this can be done while having absolutely zero mathematical knowledge.
Basically dark times we live in.
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Yes, it is possible to script without math..
Conditions, events, loops , basic comparisons, object manipulation.
local Players = game:GetService("Players")
Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(player)
player.CharacterAdded:Connect(function(character)
local humanoid = character:WaitForChild("Humanoid")
humanoid.Died:Connect(function()
print(player.Name .. " died")
end)
end)
end)
I’ve seen boot-sector games made like this with no real math at all.
They defined colors.. blue + red = green .. kind of thing.
yeah i’ve been doing it for two whole years
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What are you talking about 
, what is math bro? I don’t know what math is but its probably possible without it, since I’ve never heard of it, and have been coding for some time.
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No. You’re not going to be doing any advanced calculus by any means unless you’re redoing the entire physics engine, but math in general will come up often, whether or not you have to consider DeltaTime for systems that are affected by variable framerate, or if you’re working with camera manipulation and have to deal with CFrames, Vector3, and rotational/positional axes.
This is definitely possible! There will be a few times where you may need a little equation but it’s as simple as either checking the Dev fourm or asking ai to figure out a calculation for you (which usually works out pretty nice!)
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Math is just logic with numbers. If you can think logically then you can do math.
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Scripting is essentially just logic, data and math. So yes, you can script without math and the most you will need in a day to day basis can be figured out by asking around or using AI.
You should know this though, algebra is essentially a key part of programming, whether you’re aware of it or not. If you know one, you know the other, even if you don’t realise it.
There is a catch to this answer however, which shouldn’t be sugar coated…
Math is fundementally a core skill in programming, so when you don’t understand that core skill you’ll, be inclined to make poor design choices, as you won’t understand how to derive meaningful measurements from the data you have. That wont appear for most of your day to day, but it’s something that’ll present itself sooner or later.
You can of course use AI to handle much of it these days, but you can’t exactly search for something when you don’t even know you should be searching for it. AI is only as good as the questions you ask it.
In game developing especially, there’s only so much you can do with logic and piping data. Sooner or later, you’ll need to derive your own measurements from that data or create new data which may require algebra, statistics, calculus, geometry and/or matrices (This is what a CFrame essentially is).
So honestly, don’t lie to yourself, but don’t over think it either. Math is going to be something you will sooner or later have to pick up, but it’s not as daunting of a task as you may think.
Khan Academy and the internet in general is your friend, you can find so many people in communities like Robloxian Mathematical Society who couldn’t be more eager to help you learn even the basics. You should also look online for text books on Amazon or free PDFs, you’d be amazed at how superior they are at teaching compared to what schools provide.
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Actually as long you have a core idea (for example what you want to optimize) and you provide AI with your code, and ask it specifically to figure out ideas to achieve what you asked, it can figure out mathematical tricks, suggest them and then apply them to your code. You can even ask it to find the key bottlenecks in your code, or identify bugs, or figure out why specific inputs create wrong outputs. AI isn’t perfect, but it has gotten really good recently, especially Claude and Gemini. On top of that, ChatGPT may not be that good for specific things, but compared to other AIs it has a “good eye”, in the sense that even if it can’t fix your code as precisely as Claude, it can notice things you didn’t even ask it to notice, and mention them to you.
Another thing I have noticed is that sometimes what really helps out LLMs is to push them down a specific intelligence / specialization path before asking for something. For example if I want to crack a hash, I wont ask it to crack a hash first, I will first ask it for linux and cybersecurity related things. This also helps with defending many of the “safety” mechanisms known AIs have to deny you access to information. For example if you start talking about virology to an AI before asking it to engineer a virus, it is more likely to do it than asking for that directly. It reminds me a bit of how you make humans confess to things by having a chit chat with them first and breaking the ice.
AI is good for finding links to learn how to actually program. AI is a terrible programmer.
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Tell me you haven’t tried Claude without telling me.
depends on what you’re doing really. in general you’ll always end up eventually doing basic maths and only do more complex maths when you do something that is more complex, which you can always research to find formulas
I use AI all the time, just not to write scripts. It blows Google away for searching for things, and it can make a sentence look great. As far as programming, it’s probably around a first-year programmer with the confidence of a lifetime programmer. It will also just make stuff up and sound pretty convincing. As far as the math thing, you can make your own math in a program. I once saw an entire game made in the boot sector of a disk using colors as a math base. I’m sure you can look it up. People claim to this day they don’t know how this was done, and there are very few made like this. They literally made up a color-based math system and used that to do the calculations. At that point, there was no system to reference for anything.. pure assembler techniques using “color math”.
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I failed math many times in school and I code full games just fine, the only “math” I have to do is with game balancing which is primary school math
definitely, whenever im really stuck ill ask where i went wrong and it always screws up my code even more
Luckily most problems i can solve by myself and i don’t really like using ai so i ask devforum
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