It’s right handed. Get over it. It is an arbitrary decision, but so what? Everyone has their own preference for how they visualise things (I for example interpret +z as forwards/into the screen, and +y is up, and don’t really care about x), in the same way that everyone visualises the flow of time differently. The maths is no easier or harder either way, but it’s a real pain to convert between them when people make different assumptions. DirectX doesn’t insist on left handed (no matter what anyone has told you – it provides left and right handed versions of all the view/projection functions that care), OpenGL assumes right handed, all the big modelling tools use right-handed. The majority have spoken already on this, but every single developer that chooses to buck the trend makes the rest of our lives more painful.

And if I ever have to debug another handed-ness related problem, I think I’m going to cut off my right hand and replace it with a sharpened set of axes, then go round visiting all the games studios in the land, slashing and gouging all those who want to argue about it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under Industry Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.