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

Summary


We covered a lot of ground in this book. I want to take a minute and reflect on all the topics we covered, and the learning that is still ahead.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 covered the basics of Linear Algebra. Having this mathematical foundation is central to writing a physics engine!

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 covered what two-dimensional primitives are and how to detect intersections between them.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 covered what three-dimensional primitives are and the most efficient way to determine intersections between them.

Chapters 11, 12, and 13 covered meshes, scenes, and scene organization. These skills become important as you construct larger and more elaborate scenes.

Finally, chapters 14, 15, and 16 covered physics. Throughout these three chapters, we built a very basic physics engine. Even though the engine is basic, we did some interesting things with it. We implemented particle physics, rigid body physics, and soft body physics (cloth), all in the same engine.

In the appendix, you were given several book and open source game engine references. Reading the source code of open source engines is very important. Topics covered in books and academic papers are often easier to understand when you can go through the code that is executing. I highly encourage for the first resource be reading through the Box2D Lite source code after reading this book.