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

Raycast sphere


In order to solve collisions against constraints, we will need to determine some extra information about rays being cast into the world. In our current implementation, each raycast returns a floating point t-value. From this value we can infer if the ray hit anything and if it did at what point the intersection happened. We still need this t-value, but we also need to know the normal of the surface that the ray hit.

Getting ready

In this section, we will start modifying the Raycast function to return more data. To achieve this, we first declare a new RaycastResult data structure. We will also implement a helper method to reset the new RaycastResult data structure.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to update the RaycastSphere function in a way that it returns more useful data:

  1. Declare the RaycastResult structure and ResetRaycastResult function in Geometry3D.h:

    typedef struct RaycastResult {
        vec3 point;
        vec3 normal;
        float t;
        bool hit;
    } RaycastResult;
    void ResetRaycastResult...