i'm planning to do a project for my final year at university involving the development of some sort of physics engine. nothing too advanced in terms of graphics and stuff. i'm not really sure where to begin with this, like whether to build from scratch or take open source sdks and build on that (most likey). i'm not new to programming in general and would like to know whether its possible to do this sort of thing in just c++, or would i need to learn opengl or something else. i'm thinking it would be best to start at the begining, maybe do some simple 2d collisions then build up to a 3d design. could anyone point me in any helpful direction? any help would be appreciated.

After a quick google search, I found Physical, which appears to be a physics game engine. You might want to take a look at it since it looks pretty interesting:

Took a look at the Physical site, seems pretty interesting...and simple. Might be just what I need to get started. It also seems to be object oriented, which is right up my alley.

I had downloaded a few open source sdk's (namely ODE and Tokamak) but had no idea how to start programming with them. I'll see if I can start something with Physical.