"Because they had extremely limited computing power, they had to write their code as efficiently as possible. Consider the first-person shooter Quake III Arena, usually called Quake 3, for example: players navigated a three-dimensional world, so the programmers had to find the cleverest ways to handle 3D graphics and the associated calculations. Quake 3 released in 1999 and is considered one of the best computer games of its time."
"To figure out the orientations of objects, characters or other players in three-dimensional space mathematically, you create a vector, which is essentially an arrow that shows direction. To compare vectors, they need to be normalized to the same length, so you have to scale them accordingly. And that's where a tricky calculation comes up: the inverse square root, which is one divided by the square root of a number."
Game developers faced severe computing-power constraints in the 1990s and therefore optimized code heavily. Quake III Arena (Quake 3), released in 1999, offered a pioneering multiplayer first-person shooter experience and influenced the industry. Players navigated three-dimensional environments, requiring efficient handling of 3D graphics and computations. Vector orientations required normalization, which depends on the inverse square root. The inverse square root calculation was computationally expensive due to the square root and division operations. Quake 3 included an unusually efficient inverse square root algorithm that reduced processing time and continues to interest experts and scientists.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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