Very quickly:
- cross product gets you a vector that is at right-angles to two other vectors. Obviously this only makes sense in 3d. You might want this for working out the normal of a polygon, for the purposes of collision or shading.
- dot product can either get you the angle between two vectors, or lets you 'project' one vector on to another. You might want to do that to constrain an object's movement onto a given line, for example.
-Scalar multiplication is just the mulitplication of every component of a vector by some fixed number. you might multiply a velocity vector by a small number to get a friction effect.
-Normalization gives you a vector of length 1 which is still pointing in the same direction as the original vector. This is used in collision detection, or for all sorts of reasons.
Honestly, you don't need to just memorise these and their uses off by heart. If you come up against something you need and you don't know how to do it, just look up how to do it and you'll learn that way.
- cross product gets you a vector that is at right-angles to two other vectors. Obviously this only makes sense in 3d. You might want this for working out the normal of a polygon, for the purposes of collision or shading.
- dot product can either get you the angle between two vectors, or lets you 'project' one vector on to another. You might want to do that to constrain an object's movement onto a given line, for example.
-Scalar multiplication is just the mulitplication of every component of a vector by some fixed number. you might multiply a velocity vector by a small number to get a friction effect.
-Normalization gives you a vector of length 1 which is still pointing in the same direction as the original vector. This is used in collision detection, or for all sorts of reasons.
Honestly, you don't need to just memorise these and their uses off by heart. If you come up against something you need and you don't know how to do it, just look up how to do it and you'll learn that way.