Physics for Game Developers by David M Bourg
Published November 2001
List Price: $39.95, Your Amazon.com Price: $25.17
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Summary Physics for Game Developers serves as the starting point for those who want to enrich games with physics-based realism. Part one is a mechanics primer that reviews basic concepts and addresses aspects of rigid body dynamics, including kinematics, force, and kinetics. Part two applies these concepts to specific real-world problems, such as projectiles, boats, airplanes, and cars. Part three introduces real-time simulations and shows how they apply to computer games.
This book provides a good starting point for anyone looking to introduce more realistic physics into their game. It provides an overview of the laws of mechanics, focusing on rigid body and particle dynamics. It then takes these principles and applies them to specific simulations which often come up in games, such as projectiles, cars, airplanes, and hovercraft. The math is simplified, so the results are not always completely accurate, but they should be good enough for many games.
The book does have several shortcomings which prevent it from being a great book, the most important of which is that the content is fairly limited. It's less than 300 pages, and a significant amount of space (especially in the later chapters) is taken by source code listings. Of course, this is somewhat offset by the book's relatively low price.
If you buy this expecting it to be the ultimate guide to physics in games, you'll be disappointed. However, if you buy it as an introduction (which how it's intended to be used), I think you'll be happy with it.
This book's pretty good. My main complaint is the author just doesn't go in depth enough on many topics, plus many of the demos work very poorly or not at all.
I bought this book expecting to learn to implement a complete rigid body physics system. Nope. The code for the examples isn't reusable, and is very inefficient. Plus some of the techniques described in the book (especially the one concerning interpenetration between bodies) just don't work, and are very processor intensive and unoptimized.
I was pretty disapointed when I first saw the book I've orderd. It's pretty thin and only paperback format. Well.. when I read the table of contents (and the first chapter) I found out that this book is very good. Perhaps one of the best books I own (not included AI Game Programming Wisdom :-)
However, the author is great in physics and stuff, but the demos on the webpage looks horrible!!
Well, I've just read the first 3 chapters, but I think it's great. It's well explained and the examples are very nice.
Altough it's a pity that he uses a lot of dificult words, which is hard if your mother language is not English. Tricks Of The Windows Game Programming Guru's is in that aspact a way better! But tough it's a great book!!
Like the rest of the reviewers, I was somewhat disapointed with the amount of content in the book, especially since it expects you to know some basic physics and calculus already. Like them, I bought it the day it came out, and was pretty pleased with it (especially since it helped me on my physics final [highschool physics, that is]). It does go into some "hardcore" physics, but not indepth as much as I would have wanted. Also, all of the code that deals with graphics was written in DirectX (Direct3D), so if your video card does not support it well, the demo's will look horrible.
I look foward to other Game Development releases O'Reilly comes out with, but maybe I'll be a little more hesitant to pick one up so quickly.
I reacted the same way Akura did, when I saw this book, I wanted it as soon as possible. However, I live in Sweden, so I had to wait for it to get here, to avoid expensive shipment. Now when I've got it, I find it an outstanding book, but being not having English as my native language I find it sometimes hard to understand, most because of having learnt physics and math in Swedish, but this really isn't the book's fault. Overall, this is a great book for people who are interested in physically accurate games. Great!
When I saw that this book was available, I rushed to get it. Amazon nor fatbrain had it so I ordered directly from Orielly, But I think I put my standard too high.
While this is a very good book, I was hoping that it covered things more indepth. IT gives you a very good introduction to the physics and games, but lacks that little touch like adding some thoughts on weight transfer on cars (the whole chapter about cars is 4 pages, I have a book that ONLY focus on cars and its more than 500).
The is some problems with the examples available fomr the o'Rilley site for this book (2 of them don't run) but the biggest one is probably the last example program (the 3d rigid body simulator) where the system explodes (mathematically speaking) with collisions. While I haven't analyzed the code, I suppose its the result of using Euler integration instead of a 4th or superior order approximation (runge Kutta for example) but I'll have to check the code to see if it is a math problem or a physics one.
Also, some of the graphics are weird, they have a legend for four functions, and only two show on the graph.
I suppose all this negatively is from my high expectations for the book, so if you are eager to buy a physics book that will make you an expert, well, buy this as an introduction and then get some classic books on classical mechanics like Beer & Johnson book.
Also, the code is in C, but its designed in a object oriented way, which makes it sometimes hard to understand (making it in C++ would have save both pages and make the code more readable).
Overall, is a very good introduction, and you can expect that by the end of the book, you can realistic model physics on your games, but not to the level of accuracy (like weight tranfer or cars on springs for a racing game) that is needed for the today's games.
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