I would say you could. Personally I find it to be a wonderful site. With regards to game engines, I would focus on matrices and vectors. Knowing both of these in and out would be very helpful, as transforming matrices is very important for most game engines.

Could i learn most of the maths and physics needed in games/game engines (game engines) at khan academy ?

I would say you could. Personally I find it to be a wonderful site. With regards to game engines, I would focus on matrices and vectors. Knowing both of these in and out would be very helpful, as transforming matrices is very important for most game engines.

Yes, you sure could. But, quoting from the homepage of the book I'm reading right now:

Can't I just learn math from the web?

Yes you can! Web resources like: the Khan academy, Thomson's calculus book, Feynman's lectures on physics, and Strang's lectures on linear algebra are amazing.

However, information on the Internet is often poorly organized and you might find it difficult to know what is important and what is not.

Books have a cost, but can save you time and effort. I can wholeheartedly recommend "No bullshit guide to math and physics" (see the previous link). While it probably doesn't present anything you haven't seen before, the presentation is clear and engaging, it has a very smooth flow, and the author has worked extensively as a tutor. All in all, I like the book a lot. I didn't really learn calculus and physics in college - I memorized a lot of formulae and passed the tests, but had a hard time applying it to actual problems, and forgot most of it in a short time. This time around I'm actually learning rather than memorizing.

There are also other books targeted squarely at game developers on both math and physics; I have yet to buy and read those so I can't really tell from experience whether they're good or not, but they got good reviews. The thing is, in order to tackle those, you need a solid basis.

Of course, you could just look at the TOCs of the books and study each topic on your own. But while that won't cost you money, it will cost you time. Books that save you time pay for themselves (pardon the pun) in no time.

Best of luck on your endeavours.

Hello,

Author of the No BS guide to math and physics here.

I think your quest to learn physics via gamedev/physics simulations is a great idea.

I don't know your background, but if you learn about the quadratic equation, and

enough physics to understand where the kinematics equations come from:

a(t) = a,

v(t) = v_i + a*t,

x(t) = x_i + v_i*t + 0.5*a*t*t,

you'll be able to animate the trajectory of projectiles and create a basic simulations...

It gets more complicated with collisions, contact forces, etc. so then you should

follow The First Rule of Software Development and use a an existing library ;)

BTW, I started work on a physics engine myself and I will continue working on it as soon as I have some free time:

https://github.com/ivanistheone/phys.js

the basic idea is to build "physics challenges" that can be solved at many different levels.

Imagine a projectile-must-hit-the-target type of game that can be "solved" using

trial and error (say using a slingshot UI element like in angry birds),

by using equations (high school mechanics knowledge),

analytically (using calculus methods), or programatically.

The answer of the challenge could be in the form of a JS function:

Find the position function of an object for all times t =3 seconds, if it starts

from $x_i=20$[m], with $v_i=10$[m/s] and undergoes

answer = function (t) { var tt,ttt; return x_i + integrate( v_i + integrate( a, (tt,0,ttt)), (ttt,0,t) ); }

Proof of concept using sympy: http://bit.ly/1m1cIcQ

Let me know if you would like to help with the coding (JS or python),

or alternately if you want to be a "test user" :)

Ivan

_______

More links: https://github.com/ivanistheone/phys.js/tree/master/doc/Links

in particular this looks awesome: http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/