Built Unreal Engine.

Transcript context

…All the experimentation and all the exploration somehow contributed, somehow made sense later on. All of that is integrated somehow in the stuff you build. It’s funny how life works. The pieces kind of come together eventually. Yeah, there are definitely karate kid moments because all this time I was learning math in high school and in college I studied mechanical engineering. And so you learn all kinds of math, vector calculus and vector math and matrices and all of these related fields, physics and stress and strain and how to deal with complex physical systems. And yeah, I wasn’t really sure how engineers would actually make use of that knowledge. Do you just forget about it when you actually go off to do work or do you write down equations on paper? It was actually not clear as an early engineering student what you do, but when I started writing the first generation Unreal Engine and I was dealing with 3DMS, I was like, wait, I know this stuff. I learned this. And so suddenly like the karate kid, you get to paint the fence and wax the car and suddenly put all the pieces together into a 3D engine based on a whole lot of accumulated programming language and math knowledge, often knowledge gained without ever anticipating that I might use it in that way. Also, I think what’s useful is over and over learning a hard thing and then showing to yourself that you can do it, that you can learn a hard thing. So then when you come to having to write a 3D engine in ways that haven’t been done before, you’re like, I’ve been here. I’ve been here in this experience, I don’t know what to do, but we’ll figure it out. We’ll learn. I’ll learn all the necessary components. So just not being afraid of something new.…

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