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

Camera controls


In this section, we are going to make the camera more useful. We will extend the camera class to create an Orbital Camera. Many 3D content creation tools such as 3DS Max or Unity3D use Orbital Cameras to navigate a 3D scene.

Getting ready

We are going to implement an Orbital Camera that will help us visualize what is happening within our physics simulations. This camera has three public functions that need to be called when input is received. The camera also has an update function that should be called at the end of every frame. The three functions that need to be called on input are Rotate, Zoom, and Pan. The Update function should always be the last camera function to be called during a frame.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to create a new Orbital Camera. Orbit cameras are used by most 3D Content Creation applications to view a 3D scene. Sometimes, these are referred to as free cameras:

  1. Start declaring the OrbitCamera class in Camera.h by declaring the protected variables...