I was wondering if anyone knows any good places to learn game physics. Paticulary rigid body physics. I'm programming in C# so if there are some tutorials targetted to that language, would be wonderful ^_^.

honestly, just get a good high school/ college physics text book and learn physics. The application in code is trivial. It's understanding the physics itself that's the learning challenge. There's not much special about physics in games; we just use normal physics to help our simulations.

-me

Quote:Original post by Palidine
honestly, just get a good high school/ college physics text book and learn physics. The application in code is trivial. It's understanding the physics itself that's the learning challenge. There's not much special about physics in games; we just use normal physics to help our simulations.

-me

Just knowing the physics doesn't explain to me though how to apply it to a actual program. When creating a rigidbody do the legs and stuff need to be seperate sprites? Things like that.

Quote:Original post by Kalagaraz
Just knowing the physics doesn't explain to me though how to apply it to a actual program. When creating a rigidbody do the legs and stuff need to be seperate sprites? Things like that.

perhaps. It actually sounds like you have 2 things to learn:

1) physics
2) game programming

the former will inform programming decisions but typically once you know physics and once you know game programming combining the two is really easy. want to make something move: goto kinematics section of textbook. Need moments of inertia: go to moments chapter.

Specific to your exampls:
A rigid body is a rigid body. if you have 2 parts of an object that you want to move seperately and effect eachother then they have to be seperate sub-objects or at least seperate physics objects.

Basically, if you know rigid body physics the implementation details will be mostly obvious. If you know a series of math can effect only the rotation and movement of the body as a whole then you know you need seperate simulations for each part that moves. whether or not that involves 1 sprite or two isn't going to be covered in a physics book (whether it's related to game programming or not). That's a game programming decision that's not really effected by the physics simulation.

At any rate, i believe there are game development specific texts (I think there's a Gems book on game physics). My experience has been that a good high school or college text is infinitely better than application specific texts. The latter tend to only give a single implementation for each problem. The former teaches you the math whereby you can understand why the Gems book used a particular implementation and suggest alternate implementations.

-me

How exactly does implemented a physics engine work, like PhysX? Does it just provide a bunch of formula functions for you to use and then you hook them all togeather?

Quote:Original post by Agony
I've gotten some good use out of articles written by Chris Hecker, and I have some articles by David Baraff on my computer as well, that I'm planning on reading. They might be of use.

I was reading chris heckers articles awhile ago ^_^. It uses a bunch of calculus those that I don't know :'(

http://tutor4physics.com/motion1d.htm

found that one a minute ago, looks pretty basic.

just keep track of your time and you should be good to go.


time elapsed = now
loop {
...
time elapsed = time elapsed - now
draw
time elapsed = now
...
}

oh yea, do get a high school physics book like the others said. im sure your local library has 14 of them :)