Physics - Mechanics

These pages aim to give enough physics information to allow physical objects to be simulated by a computer program.

Statics Situation where forces are in balance.
Kinematics Kinematics: The study and description of motion, without regard to its causes, including position, orientation, velocity, angular velocity, acceleration. For example, we can calculate the end point of a robot arm from the angles of all its joints. Alternatively, given the end point of the robot arm, we could calculate the angles and settings of all its joints required to put it there (inverse kinematics - IK).
Dynamics Covers the causes of motion in terms of properties like mass and inertia. Including movement in free space, rotation of solid body, Inertia, Energy and Momentum, Collision, Impulse and Spring, mass, damper model
Table Top Physics Gives examples and thought experiments to illustrate some of the problems and complexities that we need to solve

 


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Correspondence about this page

Book Shop - Further reading.

Where I can, I have put links to Amazon for books that are relevant to the subject, click on the appropriate country flag to get more details of the book or to buy it from them.

cover Physics for Game Developers - Assumes a knowledge of vectors, Matrix and trigonometry (the book has a one page introduction to quatnions). The book introduces Newtons laws but it does assume a basic knowledge physics. It covers Kinematics, Force, Kinetics, Collision (detection), Projectiles, Aircraft, Ships, Hovercraft, Cars, Real-time, 2D rigid body, Collision Response, Rigid body rotation, 3D rigid body, multiple bodies in 3D and particles. (I cant find a general formula for collision response which combines linear and rotation, but there may be something in the code included?). If you don't have the prerequisite knowledge of Matrices etc. you may want to get the Mathematics for 3D Game programming book first.

Commercial Software Shop

Where I can, I have put links to Amazon for commercial software, not directly related to the software project, but related to the subject being discussed, click on the appropriate country flag to get more details of the software or to buy it from them.

 

cover Dark Basic Professional Edition - It is better to get this professional edition

cover This is a version of basic designed for building games, for example to rotate a cube you might do the following:
make object cube 1,100
for x=1 to 360
rotate object 1,x,x,0
next x

cover Game Programming with Darkbasic - book for above software

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