Hi everyone! I'm new here. I've just started to learn about creating games and I started with a simple pong game. I got the ball bouncing all over the place. Its complete as a pong look alike. I've coded it using XNA for C# because it seems like a nice place to start and I do hope to make games to submit to XBox Live and make a little cash on the side. And the XNA forums seem to be useless (not to talk bad about them or anything there just not to helpful to newbies especially thos who didn't understand vectors a week ago (and still kinda don't))

Anyway I believe the next step in the process is to make a more complicate version of pong. I want apply the magnus effect to the ball so it make the bouncing less predicable. I was thinking of applying it randomly. not based on the paddle moving or anything. So its a new twist on the game. But, I have no clue what I'm doing. I've see equations and a program written in a physic book but that was more for predicting the falling location of a golf ball, or mortar shell. not very useful to a newbie such as my self (plus I couldn't understand why it had (time * mass) couldn't wrap my head around that one or how to apply it to a game that updates 60 times a second)

I've searched the forum before posting but all the links posted were beyond me or just 404'd

So anyone willing to help out a newbie? I don't need the answer handed to me on a sliver platter (although it would be nice).

This might assist a little:

When you have a game that updates 60 times a second, in equations you can use the frame counter as 'time', and for mass you can initially use an arbitrary value which you can adjust to fit gameplay mechanics by playtesting the game.

So for example if you have mass * time, then this becomes a simple frame_counter * arbitrary_mass. Think of it as plotting a graph, where time is your X axis and your output is the Y axis.

A lot of in-game physics especially when you are new to it are simply estimation and repeated testing until you are happy with it, feed in basic approximations of the maths and play with it.

This is probably over-simplifying the issue, but when dealing with physics in games, especially simple 2D games it helps. To paraphrase a game programming book, it isnt important to know the exact forces on every atom to implement physics in a game, only a basic estimation. (Take a look for an XNA game programming book such as "Professional XNA Game Programming" by Benjamin Nitschke)

Thanks for the replies.
braindigitalis I didn't think about it that way, thanks. Man this whole adventure has been quite disheartening. I thought I was good at math, and programming. I'll try that and get back to you.