Hey guys, Why is physics important if you are interested in programming etc? i have been thinking about this and still can''t think why! Thankz guys/girls ----------------------- This space is for sale -----------------------

5 Years ago, people where happy with things like mario, arcade games, and mortal combat. They had no concept of pyhsics, all they had was a simple integer that said their current speed and decreased it every update. Today, people expect ALOT more, you look at unreal tournament, quake III, tribes (espeasically tribes), ANY current racing sim, ANY flight program be it ms flight sim 2002 or janes combat sim. ALL these games have pretty advanced physics to give the player a more imersive enviroment. Gravity is important, forces, acceleration, mass and so on. If games only simplied modeled this people would tell. It''s more or less expected, while you may not need to major in physics in college, having a very good uinderstanding of high school phyics will go along way, along with a reference, be it a college book, or reference of formulas.

Mind you, there are 2 common ways to do phyics, trigonmetry method (vectors), or calculus method (dervitaves and intergrals.)

You should learn both, vectors can be easier to setup, but certain calc methords compute faster, (not a insane amount of sin cosine calculations)

Anyways, if you intend to do anything more advanced then a 2d arcade game, you''ll need physics.
Trust me everything you need to program a game is dauting,
C/C++
OS API (win32,mac,linux)
3d API (opengl,directx,3dfx ewww!)
sound programming
file mangament
network code
input
physics
possibly asm, but current computers have the speed that you can get away without using asm at all.
then you have to learn to debug your code, organize it,and even optimize it.

Good luck in your programming

-Scott

Bingo. So much of game programming is physics! How else will you know how a grenade will bounce and come to a stop? Or how a car should react in a wet condition while going 46.43 mph and attempting a sharp turn? People used to make it look close to right, now it has to be right. Old games used scripted physics. Such as, we''ll make this rock always behave this way. With current games it doesn''t cut it. You best be able to calculate something that at least looks right for a large and diverse game world, or you won''t be selling anything.

Alex Broadwin
A-Tronic Software & Design
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"if you fail in life, you were destined to fail. If you suceed in life, call me."
"The answer is out there."
"Please help, I''m using Windows!"

My god you guys are smart, you sure no how to explain things!

I hope you don''t mind me hitting you with another question?

Anyhow,

Say i want to design a virus scanner that uses graphics. When i say graphics i mean a total graphics layout, how would i go about doing it? Without the ugly DOS layout?

Can i do it in just C++, without OpenGL?


Thankz for all the input!



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A virus-scanner with nice graphics? Now that''d be original. And since it is original, you''ll have to come up with your own graphics for it. But OpenGL doesn''t seem like a good choice for that to me, although you can use it of course. I think you''d better make some simple 2D-graphics engine with just the Windows GDI.

But now I''ve got a question : Where''d you use the graphics in a virus-scanner? Of course, I can imagine that you want to place some nice icon or so next to a "virus found" message or at the very most make a nice skin for it, but really like a game or so graphics for a scanner? Seems weird to me...

It would be like virus scan, the skin and creating a window of some sort in the graphics skin? How is it possible to incorporate simple graphics into a C++ program and getting rid of the DOS window layout?

Thanks for all the help!



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