Game Physics Cookbook

Collision Detection and Rigid body physics for Game Development

Key Features

• Get a comprehensive coverage of techniques to create high performance collision detection in games
• Learn the core mathematics concepts and physics involved in depicting collision detection for your games
• Get a hands-on experience of building a rigid body physics engine

Book Description

Physics is really important for game programmers who want to add realism and functionality to their games. Collision detection in particular is a problem that affects all game developers, regardless of the platform, engine, or toolkit they use.

This book will teach you the concepts and formulas behind collision detection. You will also be taught how to build a simple physics engine, where Rigid Body physics is the main focus, and learn about intersection algorithms for primitive shapes.

You’ll begin by building a strong foundation in mathematics that will be used throughout the book. We’ll guide you through implementing 2D and 3D primitives and show you how to perform effective collision tests for them. We then pivot to one of the harder areas of game development—collision detection and resolution.

Further on, you will learn what a Physics engine is, how to set up a game window, and how to implement rendering. We’ll explore advanced physics topics such as constraint solving. You’ll also find out how to implement a rudimentary physics engine, which you can use to build an Angry Birds type of game or a more advanced game.

By the end of the book, you will have implemented all primitive and some advanced collision tests, and you will be able to read on geometry and linear Algebra formulas to take forward to your own games!

What you will learn

• Implement fundamental maths so you can develop solid game physics
• Use matrices to encode linear transformations
• Know how to check geometric primitives for collisions
• Build a Physics engine that can create realistic rigid body behavior
• Understand advanced techniques, including the Separating Axis Theorem
• Create physically accurate collision reactions
• Explore spatial partitioning as an acceleration structure for collisions
• Resolve rigid body collisions between primitive shapes

Who this book is for

This book is for beginner to intermediate game developers. You don’t need to have a formal education in games—you can be a hobbyist or indie developer who started making games with Unity 3D.

Table of Contents

1. Vectors
2. Matrices
3. Matrix Transformations
4. 2D Shapes
5. 2D Collisions
6. 2D Optimizations
7. 3D Primitive Shapes
8. 3D Point Tests
9. 3D Shape Intersections
10. 3D Line Intersections
11. Triangles and Meshes
12. Models and Scenes
13. Camera and Frustum
14. Constraint Solving
15. Manifolds and Impulses
16. Springs and Joints
17. Advanced Topics

Gabor Szauer has been making games since 2010. He graduated from Full Sail University in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in game development. Gabor maintains an active Twitter presence, and maintains a programming-oriented game development blog. Gabor's previously published books are Game Physics Programming Cookbook and Lua Quick Start Guide, both published by Packt.