Ragdoll Physics

With, as you say, only average math skills, I would advise that you use a library instead of trying to write your own physics that supports ragdolls. You're less likely to become very frustrated or completely stuck to the point of giving up. Not that I think you would, but physics isn't always easy or intuitive to implement. For ragdolls, even if you just have skeleton joints that are unconstrained ball joints (vs., say, hinge joints with rotation limits), implementing ragdolls requires somewhat advanced math. Then there is the issue of authoring ragdoll content...existing libraries do have art pipelines for creating these things, but if you roll your own you'd have to deal with the content development tools as well....lots of work that as a student of game development you could avoid and be none the worse for it.

If you use one of the open source physics libraries, such as Bullet, I'm sure the licensing is such that you could ship a commercial product without paying a license fee or royalty. I would, however, be very careful to read and comply with the license agreement for the library itself and the separate licenses that might apply to any dependencies. With open source, the issue of dependencies can be a legal pain, since different open source licenses have different requirements in terms of distribution. Commercial libraries may have less complex licensing (e.g., if they are self contained and don't use any external dependencies) but there may be license fees or royalties or other things that are troublesome for you. I don't mean to frighten you about legal stuff! Bottom line is if you intend to do anything in terms of commercial or even free public release, do your homework before you do so, to make sure you are legal.

What would be some good math subjects to read up on related to video game physics? I know algebra, little bit of geometry, and some finite mathematics.

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Original post by neal8929 What would be some good math subjects to read up on related to video game physics? I know algebra, little bit of geometry, and some finite mathematics.

As grhodes_at_work adviced you, you should grab a reference documentation of a physics library, trying to understand declarations in documentation and apply to your application.

[Edited by - JohnnyCode on March 31, 2010 3:38:04 PM]

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Original post by neal8929 What would be some good math subjects to read up on related to video game physics? I know algebra, little bit of geometry, and some finite mathematics.

Vector math, matrix math, quaternion math, numerical integration of ordinary differential equations (Euler, Runge-Kutta) would be among the most important ones.

Here is a decent article that doesn't require too much math.

This approach is pretty simple, especially if your ragdoll is a bunch of points connected by sticks. I once saw a non-physics, non-math guy, who after reading this doc wrote a simple 2D point-stick ragdoll application in C#, where the points would collide only with the walls. It only took him about 2 hours to read the doc and write the app. (To be fair, he did ask me a few questions along the way.)

When you start to bring non-trivial collision in, then you crank up the math requirements a few notches. If you want the ragdoll to drive a 3D character mesh, then you crank up the math a few more notches.