[COMMUNITY] Math sub-forum

Hi, I think a Math sub forum would be useful. Today math questions are posted a little bit everywhere, in blueprint, C++ or content creation sub-forums, but sometimes they’d better be posted into a math specific section as this is where they are the most relevant, and more importantly this is where they are the most likely to be answered by people who are keen into the math field.

Blueprint, C++ (or even graphics) is fine.

A fair few math orientated problems would be handled differently in each case, sometimes through necessity.

I’m totally against a math subforum. Dedicated math posters will fill their threads with phrases such as: “as trivial as it can get”, “from this simple equation we can clearly see”, “solution to this problem is elementary” and so on. It will cause frustration and lowered self-esteem in other forum users.

The problem is that a person keen in math but only working with blueprint will never look into the C++ forum about a math question (and vice versa). This is why I think it would be good to have a math sub-forum.

When I think about a math sub-forum I mean something related to UE, i.e. examples will use either the C++ or blueprint API, this will not be theoretical maths with specific math symbols and such. In other words content would be understandable to people using the engine and made for them. A better name would be an “Unreal Math” sub-forum :slight_smile:

Math can often be an obstacle or slowdown developers who are not used to 3D, vectors etc, I think it would be good to have a dedicated place where they can be helped, where people who like math can go and be sure not to miss messages in sub-forums they don’t usually visit.

Have you considered that there’s a good reason for that?

Outside of simpler problems, formulas and algorithms written in C++ often do not directly translate to blueprint, and in some cases cannot be easily translated at all. Blueprint users tend to rely on slightly different math nodes, and some parts of FMath aren’t exposed to blueprints in any way at all - consider Quaternions as a good example.

There is no perfect solution. I believe math is such an important topic in 3D dev it deserves a discussion forum where people can get answers for their problems and where math-liking users would hang into. For those problems which “don’t have a solution in Blueprint”, exposing them in such a forum could be an input to the Blueprint team to actually provide the tools to make them possible in Blueprint. And Blueprint users could still post math questions in the Blueprint forum if they want to, there would be nothing exclusive to that math sub-forum.

:frowning:

Especially someone like me with a math disability and ADHD

It sounds like Math and Physics section of Gamedev.net forums. Not a bad idea overall but I tend to agree with Ambershee on this - solution depends on using BP or C++. At the same time, very often math questions are appearing in Content Creation section, which could be an indication that people don’t know where to post them. Mixed BP/C++ math related discussions could be better than spreading these type of questions over 3 different sections.

Personally, I would like new Math and Physics section as it’s something I’m busy with often myself.

@BoredEngineer
It’s not because people don’t know. It’s because description says so:
Content Creation - Talk about Level Design, Static Meshes, Physics, and more.

@S-ed: well, when there is a forum where you can talk about material nodes, level design, how to use quaternions and what about the physics API, there may be a little problem of granularity…
This may have been fine initially, but today UE is big, and I think more sub-forums could find their place.

@eyoli Personally I don’t like the idea of binding a topic to one particular forum. I’d prefer placing topics based on their tags. Yet, it’s not possible with VBulletin forums.