Book Image

Game Physics Cookbook

By : Gabor Szauer
Book Image

Game Physics Cookbook

By: Gabor Szauer

Overview of this book

Physics is really important for game programmers who want to add realism and functionality to their games. Collision detection in particular is a problem that affects all game developers, regardless of the platform, engine, or toolkit they use. This book will teach you the concepts and formulas behind collision detection. You will also be taught how to build a simple physics engine, where Rigid Body physics is the main focus, and learn about intersection algorithms for primitive shapes. You’ll begin by building a strong foundation in mathematics that will be used throughout the book. We’ll guide you through implementing 2D and 3D primitives and show you how to perform effective collision tests for them. We then pivot to one of the harder areas of game development—collision detection and resolution. Further on, you will learn what a Physics engine is, how to set up a game window, and how to implement rendering. We’ll explore advanced physics topics such as constraint solving. You’ll also find out how to implement a rudimentary physics engine, which you can use to build an Angry Birds type of game or a more advanced game. By the end of the book, you will have implemented all primitive and some advanced collision tests, and you will be able to read on geometry and linear Algebra formulas to take forward to your own games!
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Game Physics Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
Acknowledgements
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Raycast Triangle


Raycasting against a triangle is a three step process:

  1. Create a plane from the three points of the triangle

  2. Raycast against that plane

  3. Check if the Raycast result is inside the triangle

We already have functions to implement this entire process. The FromTriangle function will create a plane from the triangle. We already have a Raycast function that casts a ray against a plane. We also have a PointInTriangle function.

We can improve the performance of the Raycast by using barycentric coordinates instead of the existing PointInTriangle test. Barycentric coordinates are a way to represent the position of a point relative to a triangle.

Getting ready

We are going to implement a new function, Barycentric. This new function will return the barycentric coordinates of a point with respect to a triangle. We will use this new function, along with the existing FromTriangle and Raycast functions created in Chapter 10, 3D Line Intersections to make a new Raycast against triangle function.

How...