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

Frustum object


A camera's viewing volume can be represented by a frustum. A frustum is made up of six planes, visually it looks like a pyramid with its peek truncated:

The frustum is composed of the top, bottom, left, right, near, and far planes. The normal of each plane points inward, towards the center of the frustum:

Having a view Frustum is very useful in graphics. We can use the frustum to render only what is visible to the camera. We don't need a Frustum primitive for our engine to work, but it is a very useful primitive to have in our toolbox.

Getting ready

We are going to create a new Frustum object that will contain six planes. We are also implementing an Intersection helper function, which will return the point at which three planes intersect. This helper function will be used to find the corner points of the frustum. We will also create a GetCorners function to make finding the corners of the frustum less verbose.

Our Frustum definition will contain variables named near and far. If...