Tag Archive for 'physics engine'

Space Invaders getting physical

Today I created my first experiment using the first two classes from my physics engine and they work just great! (hmmm, well… they just work ok :P )

This summer I bought a book about game physics (check http://blog.justgreat.nl/2007/07/09/game-physics-here-i-come for more details) and here is the first result:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp071201.htm

I started with the engine because last week I decided I want to build a game-like portfolio site (check http://www.justgreat.nl/ for progress…). Because every item on the site is gonna have some kind of physics applied to it, it seemed like a good idea to combine the creating of my physics engine with the creating of this portfolio site.

At the moment the engine only contains a Vector3D- and a Particle-class but I’m going to expand it the coming week(s).
To make the testing of the engine a bit more fun I added a little code to generate 5×5 pixel invaders as particles. (For the space invader-generation part I was inspired by one of Jared Tarbell’s experiments where he created little 3×3 invaders.)

Game Physics here I come…

Just great! After years I finally found the book I was looking for all the time…

Game Physics – Engine Development

I’m not really a book person, but when I tried to create a physics engine a while back I ran into a couple of major problems which stopped me from going on with it. I tried it a couple of times ever since but I always found myself stuck on the same problems (complicated collision detection etc.). Back then I searched for decent books to help me but there wern’t any. Either they were way too easy (coming with all kinds of crappy solutions) or way too hard (most of them all about theoretical physics).

I ran into this book by accident as I was actually looking for an all picture book with cool and stylish web design (Web design index by content).

I haven’t read any of it yet, but looking at the pics inside it is exactly what I needed :D .
I tend to read it in my vacation so you might expect some nice experiments in the near future.

For those of you who are interested:

Game Physics – Engine Development by Ian Millington
isbn: 978-0-12-369471-3

Web design index by content
isbn: 90-5768-069-6 | http://webdesignindex.org

PS: I saw this Ian dude also has a book on AI which sounds interesting too, but that something for the future. (God, where am I gonna find the time…)