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

Integrating particles


Particles are a great place to start any physics engine. This is because particles have mass, but not volume. The lack of volume means we don't have to concern ourselves with rotation. In this section, we will create particles and move them using Euler Integration.

Integration is a way to guess where an object will be in some amount of time. In order to guess the new position of an object, we need to know its position, velocity, and all of the forces acting on the object. We first need to integrate acceleration with respect to time; this will yield the velocity of the object. We next integrate velocity with respect to time; this will yield the updated position of the object. The preceding integrations come right from Newton's Laws of Motion:

  • An objects velocity will not change unless affected by an external force

  • The acceleration of an object is proportional to the magnitude of the force acting on the object, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object

  • Every action...