Adding Physics

Hello again! It's been some time since I provided an update on this project, but things have been moving along. As the title suggests, I've been working on adding physics. There are many free physics libraries available online (e.g. NVidia PhysX, Bullet Physics, Havok Physics [free in Unity with a Personal/Plus Unity subscription], and Box2D). In order to gain a deeper understanding of physics and physics programming, I decided to implement a physics library to use for this game. I don't necessarily need a full physics library, but just enough to do some interesting things. I used the book Game Physics Engine Development: How to Build a Robust Commercial-Grade Physics Engine for your Game by Ian Millington (link) as my main resource during development. The book provides readers with the necessary background mathematics, collision detection algorithms for various bounding primitives, and a relatively thorough explanation of physics calculations.

It's definitely been rewarding to get even the simple example in the video above working. The book provides a good physics programming foundation, but leaves a lot of room to make your own decisions as well. For those interested, you can also find the source code for the book's physics engine, cyclone, on Ian Millington's github.

Thanks for reading and Happy Holidays!