Humble Tech Book Bundle: Math for Programmers 2024 by Manning

Never say never! I worked on the original Dead Space (2008). There's a minigame in chapter 4 where you have to defend the ship's hull from incoming asteroids by shooting them with a cannon. On completion of the challenge, there's some explanation as to why the cannon's auto-targetting system is back online and you can leave the minigame and the cannon automatically continues shooting asteroids as you wander off. While I was rummaging around the code for this, I stumbled across a quadratic formula implementation. On closer inspection I discovered that some smart cookie had actually implemented the cannon's auto-targetting system for real! It actually tracked each asteroid's velocity and speed and aimed ahead of the target to hit it with its slow-moving projectiles. I just assumed the whole thing would be playing a canned animation faking the cannon shooting at the asteroids. My hat goes off to the programmer that decided to solve that problem - it's one of the very few times I've ever seen the quadratic formula used in gamedev!