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


In this chapter, we are going to build a camera. This camera should let us view the 3D scene we created in the last chapter. A camera might not seem relevant to physics, but we need a way to visualize everything which we are doing. As we build up the camera, you will find that most of the work revolves around matrix math covered in Chapter 2, Matrices and Chapter 3, Matrix Transformations.

A camera consists of two matrices. The view matrix is the inverse of the camera's world matrix. View matrix is used to transform the world in a way that the camera is at its center looking down the Z axis. The projection matrix transforms vertex data from eye coordinates to NDC coordinates.

Later we will use these matrices to construct a new Frustum primitive. We will finish up the chapter by learning how to un-project a point from pixel coordinates into world space. We will then use this un-projection to create a ray that allows us to pick objects in a 3D scene using the mouse.