• he/him

Coder, pun perpetrator
Grumpiness elemental
Hyperbole abuser


Tools programmer
Writer-wannabe
Did translations once upon a time
I contain multitudes


(TurfsterNTE off Twitter)


Trans rights
Black lives matter


Be excellent to each other


UE4/5 Plugins on Itch
nte.itch.io/
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in reply to @trashbang's post:

Always hated the convention that z is up/down rather than towards/away, in 2d I always saw y as vertically oriented (sure it's technically horizontal if you lay a page on a table, but we still call those edges the "top" and "bottom" of the page regardless of its actual position) so why is it suddenly one of the horizontals if we add another?

It’s based on the convention that the last axis is up. When you’re navigating a space, up is special, horizontal axes are all similar. Making z up means your maps get to be 2d x/y, locations in space can be shorthanded to (x, y) when the altitude doesn’t matter. (If you’ve ever listened to someone listing Minecraft coordinates, which are y-up, they have to say (x, -, z) which causes a variety of awkward phrasing.)
For math purposes, truncating a vector by cutting off the last coordinate is slightly more natural than cutting out the last one.

Basically: preserving y-up between 2d and 3d is foolish consistency that makes everything harder, preserving “last coordinate up” is better for everything except communicating to people who haven’t learned the convention.

Dabbling with Godot recently, this drives me extra nuts. Godot, sensibly, agrees that the vertical axis is Y — but that up is negative. To jump, you apply negative vertical velocity. 🙃