
Chapter
11
Curves
A
t first glance, curves do not appear to be a central topic in building a game en-
gine. Many game engines concentrate on taking polygonal models and process-
ing them for display by the renderer. If objects must change position or orientation
during game play, the standard approach has been just to move the objects in a simple
fashion, using translation by constant vector offset and rotation by a constant angle—
something that requires only vector and matrix algebr a (i.e., linear algebra, emphasis
on line). But curves are actually quite useful when you think about it. For example,
if a flight simulator wishes to support realistic flig ...