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

Scaling


The scale of a matrix is stored in the main diagonal of the matrix. The scale is stored as a vec3. Each element of the vec3 represents the scale on the corresponding axis. Row and Column major matrices store scale information in the same elements:

The interesting thing with storing scale inside a matrix is that it shares some of the same elements as the rotation part of the matrix. Because of this, extracting the scale of a matrix may not always yield the numbers you would expect.

Getting ready

We're going to implement three functions. One function will retrieve the scale stored inside a matrix. The other two will return a new matrix, containing only the specified scale.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to set and retrieve the scale of a matrix:

  1. Add the declaration for all scaling functions to matrices.h:

    mat4 Scale(float x, float y, float z);
    mat4 Scale(const vec3& vec);
    vec3 GetScale(const mat4& mat);
  2. Implement the functions that create a 4 X 4 matrix out of scaling information...