May I propose a dedicated circuit (analog because you can only ever approximate their value) that stores and returns transcendental/irrational numbers exclusively? We can just assume they’re going to be whatever value we need whenever we need them.
I mean, every irrational number used in computation is reliable to a certain level of precision. Just because the current (heh) methods aren’t precise enough doesn’t mean they’ll never be.
Floats are only great if you deal with numbers that have no needs for precision and accuracy. Want to calculate the F cost of an a* node? Floats are good enough.
But every time I need to get any kind of accuracy, I go straight for actual decimal numbers. Unless you are in extreme scenarios, you can afford the extra 64 to 256 bits in your memory
As a programmer who grew up without a FPU (Archimedes/Acorn), I have never liked float. But I thought this war had been lost a long time ago. Floats are everywhere. I’ve not done graphics for a bit, but I never saw a graphics card that took any form of fixed point. All geometry you load in is in floats. The shaders all work in floats.
Briefly ARM MCU work was non-float, but loads of those have float support now.
I mean you can tell good low level programmers because of how they feel about floats. But the battle does seam lost. There is lots of bit of technology that has taken turns I don’t like. Sometimes the market/bazaar has spoken and it’s wrong, but you still have to grudgingly go with it or everything is too difficult.
I think you got that wrong, you got +Inf, -Inf and two NaNs, but they’re both just NaN. As you wrote signed NaN makes no sense, though technically speaking they still have a sign bit.
I just gave up fighting. There is no system that is going to both fast and infinitely precision.
So long ago I worked in a game middleware company. One of the most common problems was skinning in local space vs global space. We kept having customers try and have global skinning and massive worlds, then upset by geometry distortion when miles away from the origin.
I’m a hobbyist game dev and when I was playing with large map generation I ended up breaking the world into a hierarchy of map sections. Tiles in a chunk were locally mapped using floats within comfortable boundaries. But when addressing portions of the map, my global coordinates included the chunk coords as an extra pair.
So an object’s location in the 2D world map might be ((122, 45), (12.522, 66.992)), where the first elements are the map chunk location and the last two are the precise “offset” coordinates within that chunk.
It wasn’t the most elegant to work with, but I was still able to generate an essentially limitless map without floating point errors poking holes in my tiling.
I’ve always been curious how that gets done in real game dev though. if you don’t mind sharing, I’d love to learn!
That’s pretty neat. Game streaming isn’t that different. It basically loads the adjacent scene blocks ready for you to wonder in that direction. Some load in LOD (Level Of Detail) versions of the scene blocks so you can see into the distance. The further away, the lower the LOD of course. Also, you shouldn’t really keep the same origin, or you will hit the distort geometry issue. Have the origin as the centre of tha current block.
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