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

Introduction


Triangles are unique as they are represented by three coplanar points. This means that a triangle will always be on a plane. This makes rendering triangles efficient, and it also makes collision detection of triangles efficient. The efficiency of triangles comes from the fact that many tests can assume that a triangle.

In this chapter, we are going to use triangles to represent a 3D model. This approach has one major limitation; we can only test for intersection, not containment. Testing for containment will require a convex hull. The convex hull will be briefly covered in Appendix, Advanced Topics.

The triangle primitive was covered in Chapter 7, 3D Primitive Shapes. This chapter will focus on intersection tests for triangles and building 3D models out of triangles.