Godot Procedural Generated Racing
This is an ongoing project to explore how procedural generated content would fit into racing games.
My experience
The most thrilling part of this project was when I attempted to take a Spline curve and coerce it's approximation into an OpenGL buffer for rendering and collision calculations. When I attempted this I knew what I needed was an interpolation along the spline, calculating the tangent so that I could place points offset from the curve by a magnitude along the normal. The interface in Godot provided an interpolation function, but no method to calculate the tangent. This I knew was basic calculus, but I hadn't calculated a derivative in years.
Instead I recalled that a derivative can be conceptualized as a rate calculation over an immeasurably small distance. So my quickest solution to get something close to a tangent was to interpolate along the spline to the desired position
\[ x \]
Then, to interpolate to the position after it in the smallest magnitude (lets say).
\[ x + 0.000001 \]
When I attempted this approach I was skeptical, but when I ended up rendering it the result was so close to what I desired that I ended up keeping it for the final draft! (after a bit of knob twiddling). So the lesson learned is that if your reasoning skills are strong enough, then it is often best to remember the basic concepts of a study, and then derive the specific concepts when needed.