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Let's not forget Dr. Brian Beckman's The Physics of Racing Series, at the time he was a researcher working at Microsoft on the Forza video game series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8GQCZgCNw8

I built an OpenGL car physics simulation as an undergrad as a project. It was very fun.

For me it was a driving simulator with side quests. This code is the spine of GTA.

I still remember GTA 2 had the best radio

Laughing vampires dance!

The diagrams seem to have been written (or generated[1]) while looking at the project source code, and use the sort of bass-ackwards approach to code documentation of giving a “post-hoc summation” that only makes sense when you’ve already read the code, rather than serving as an introduction to the code for someone who hasn’t read it yet.

That being said, AFAICT, the diagrams are also basically irrelevant to the article in its capacity as a high-level overview of the project. You can just ignore them for the purpose of reading the article.

It’s when digging into the project source code that you should look at those diagrams, and then feel frustrated by how much they suck. :)

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[1] This seems to happen a lot with LLM-generated code docs / diagrams / etc, when the docs are written in the same session as the code itself, but later; the LLM seems to see the docs as “following” the prior work in its linear context, and so mistakenly writes as if the reader of the docs will have also read whatever’s in the context before getting to the docs. That assumption, of an incrementally-growing shared context that can be implicitly made reference to by “later” text to compress that “later” text, makes a lot of sense when generating one long linear stream of prose, or even when generating a series of chain-linked entries (like conversation responses, or chapters of a book); but doesn’t work out when generating a web/graph of separate bits of text. This is kind of a fundamental flaw in producing coding agents as fine-tunes over conversational base models, and it’s one that coding-agent harnesses have yet to really focus on addressing.

That was a lot of fun to play with.

I think the fractal solver is bugged, but maybe I am just using it wrong. It says placing a cone in the red zone will block the vehicle, but either the colors are inverted or the backend is off, because everything is red except a few spots.

Otherwise very fun. I managed to park a truck the solver called impossible :)

Note: Using safari on an iPad of that matters.

This is pretty fun!

The visualization of potential results is quite mesmerizing.

GTA didn't exist back then, so I had to learn them from the lore.

And shortly afterwards, in addition to all the different physics-in-action experience, I learned about how car insurance excess works.

There was a demo of a remake in progress on the Archimedes which did the rounds back in the 90s which was also amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jssOIpGYH3E which was the first game I saw do real time anti aliased line rendering for the ship-ball connection.

Learn from the old master... with a big stinkin' LLM interposed!

I'd say you're fully off the mark here. That page contains serious architectural insight on how to make a "designed" car feeling work within a "physically correct" collision engine. Getting the balance right is super hard and he explains how to do it. I'm confident no AI could do that architecture, so this is most likely hours of hard work with a thin layer of LLM gloss on top.

No, I don't want to see the prompt. Yes it has some llm tics, but it's clear that he went back and forth before arriving at this. Why would I be interested in the transcript?

This is good shit

Why needlessly do extra work when it's easier than ever before to modernize what is already made? Why would he want to be a vanguard for "hand coding"?

I've been a developer for not nearly as long as the author but long enough that at some point it felt like I was writing the same code and same abstractions over and over again and sometimes a new novel problem would reinvigorate my love of programming but today I'm happy to let an LLM write the tedious code while I give the more fun high level architectural direction and when reviewing the code sometimes I'll give it a nudge in a different direction. I suspect the author has written code like the 2d car physics many times over. Just my 2 cents.