Trouble with understanding Physics in ROBLOX

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
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Hi! I’m Ryan (Syharaa) an aspiring 16 year old developer, right now I’m kind of going through the motions not sure what I really want to do involving IT in my future but I do know it has to be IT because I have a passion for it, right now I’m sticking with Game Development because honestly it seems fun at times and something I can manage without having to take away too much time from school.

I got into scripting about 2 years ago and I’ve been doing it on and off, but as I learned more and become more familiar with the platform and ROBLOX’s Engine I realized that if I really wanted to be original and make something of significance I’d have to be fluent in Physics and Math which honestly I’m not, just entered the 11th Grade this year and I’ll be doing Pre-Calculus and Physics when school starts.

My problem is that no matter how hard I try I can’t seem to wrap my head around calculus and physics and the math behind 3D space manipulation, I may be jumping the gun a bit since I haven’t started the course in school, but other people my age or younger have accomplished such things so why can’t I?

One of my favorite developers I look up to is EgoMoose, his creations are cool and they make me want to be able to do the same things but I just can’t because I can’t seem to understand anything even after spending hours doing research and looking at formulas ( honestly the formulas seem to confuse me even more )

I don’t want to make this longer than what it already is, so I guess all I’m asking for is some advice and direction from the Developer Community, what should I do? should I continue trying to figure out the equations for the problems I want to solve or should I just wait until I finish my courses in school and tackle it again… because honestly I’m not sure what to really do at this point besides using Open Sourced Code to accomplish my needs.

I’m not sure if this thread is in the appropriate section, please don’t crucify me if it isn’t I’ll just ask a Staff Member to move it.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read this thread, God bless you all.

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I took Pre-Calculus sophomore year and there were some topics that I learned from Roblox (Vector manipulation) before I got to class. I learned of how to obtain the area of an irregular triangle in class and not from Roblox (though I have yet to use it). Some things you learn on your own and other things you learn from school. Physics is pretty complicated to understand without applications. However, basic calculus is incredibly easy, I’d highly recommend doing MIT’s OpenCourseWare course for Calculus I if you want to learn some calculus. Physics 1 and 2 are mostly Algebra based and don’t require Calculus. Physics C: Mechanics (aka Classical Mechanics) is similar to Physics 1 but uses a calculus approach. Before I wander off-topic, I’m going to recommend you work on small projects that utilize components from Physics and mess around with it. You can use Khan Academy to see the mathematical usage and applications of vectors and you’ll realize Lua offers those mathematical functions you can perform on vectors. No one is born knowing Lua and I doubt that most developers on Roblox learned Lua by taking a course at school. You learn things as they come to you. Sometimes you may have to reach out for those things before they come to you in order to accomplish certain things. If you have a strong grasp of Lua, try modeling the projections of different projectiles with Lua. Don’t just look at the formulas, that’ll do you nothing good. Use the formulas.

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Awwn man, your post just gave me some major insight, thanks for this I’ll try to actually apply the formulas instead of trying to figure it out and then compare it to my code.

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