I am trying to write a pool game just for fun but have gotten ridiculously stuck. I have read up a bit on the theory (mostly from Wikipedia!) but still cannot get anywhere. I have read that collisions between pool balls can be easily simulated using elastic collisions, which works fine for simple one-on-one collisions. But what about the break? I have had tried all sorts of solutions but none of them work. The most successful method I have so far is just to iterate through all of the balls and consider collisions between each ball, which more-or-less works when the balls are all spaced out but not for the break. Even on paper I cannot get anywhere when I look at a before-after scenario and apply conservation of momentum and conservation of ke I get nowhere even with 2 or 3 balls in a pack it doesn't work. I have also tried using inelastic collisions but this still does not help. For example Wikipedia does a calculation using the coefficient of restitution but doesn't say how this should generalise to 2D. I have tried splitting into horizontal and vertical components but am still no closer to a solution. Does anyone have any suggestions or can they suggest a book which might help?

that physics of pool article was awesome. i used that for my pool sim, i never did get physics on the break working though, so my sim is just a test really with one or two balls around the table.

if you do get anywhere with it i'd be interested to hear how, i might advance my simple sim to be an actual game