Chapter 1, Building a Game Application, identifies the files and libraries required to incorporate the FreeGLUT and Bullet libraries into a starter project, and how to build an application layer to communicate with the operating system.

Chapter 2, Rendering and User Input, introduces some core 3D rendering concepts, implements our very first graphical object complete with lighting and color, and adds user input to our application to control the scene's camera.

Chapter 3, Physics Initialization, introduces the essential concepts of Bullet and the core objects required to build our physics simulation, and attaches a physical rigid body to our graphical object, observing how physics and graphics work together to create a simulated world.

Chapter 4, Object Management and Debug Rendering, runs through some essential refactoring of the code in order to better handle multiple objects, and adds debug rendering to our scene, enabling us to visualize essential information from the physics engine.

Chapter 5, Raycasting and Constraints, introduces the flexibility of raycasting in finding, creating, and destroying objects, and will show us how to add limitations to the motion of our physical objects, allowing even greater control of the objects in our simulation.

Chapter 6, Events, Triggers, and Explosions, implements a simple and effective method for extracting collision event information out of Bullet, builds a basic trigger volume that can trigger these events, and demonstrates the power of these features by simulating an explosion.

Chapter 7, Collision Shapes, introduces several new types of physical object and methods for rendering them from basic spheres and cylinders to shapes built from any arbitrary list of points.

Chapter 8, Collision Filtering, implements a means of separating unwanted contact responses through a simple filtering method.

Chapter 9, Soft Body Dynamics, provides a brief look at complex soft body shapes and their requirements, and implements one into our scene.

An intermediate level of understanding of the C++ language is required for this book as it is not a programming tutorial, but rather an exploration of existing APIs that have already been through countless hours of development. Also, a working knowledge of 3D mathematics is essential as it is assumed that you have a good understanding of concepts such as vectors and matrices, and how they can be used to represent a 3D space.

A C++ compiler is necessary to compile the book's source code applications. This book uses Visual Studio as a reference, and the source code comes with the Visual Studio solution files. Note that Visual Studio Express can be downloaded from the Microsoft website for free, and it has all of the features necessary to compile the source code and complete this book.

Finally, the Bullet and FreeGLUT libraries will be used, but since they are open source software, they can be freely downloaded from their project websites, which will be explained in Chapter 1, Building a Game Application.

If you're a beginner or intermediate programmer with a basic understanding of 3D mathematics and you want a stronger foundation in 3D graphics and physics, then this book is perfect for you! Learning Game Physics with Bullet Physics and OpenGL will take you through a series of straightforward tutorials until you have a strong foundation in both APIs. You'll even learn some of the fundamental concepts in 3D mathematics, and software design that lies beneath them both, discovering some techniques and tricks in graphics and physics that you will use in any game development project.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The glutKeyboardFunc and glutKeyboardUpFunc functions are called when FreeGLUT detects that a keyboard key has been pressed down or up, respectively."

A block of code is set as follows:

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  BulletOpenGLApplication demo;
  return glutmain(argc, argv, 1024, 768, "Introduction to Game Physics with Bullet Physics and OpenGL", &demo);
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

DrawBox(btVector3(1, 1, 1), btVector3(1.0f, 0.2f, 0.2f));

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To run a different project, right-click on one of the projects, and select Set as StartUp Project."

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