Physics book

It all depends on your own background. [totally] When I read it, the book felt like an oversimplified set of examples with ommissions and hand-waving in the more technical material.

What kind of examples are you searching for?

Are you looking for real-world physics and collision response, or at the other end of the spectrum for pong/breakout style collision detection with linear motion? Are you looking for information about using a physics engine so you don't have to do all that work by yourself? Are you looking for hints at how to represent your in-game objects with representations in physics systems?


No matter what you are looking for, there is no substitue for experience. Rather than just looking at the code samples included with books and tutorials, writing your own similar programs and modifying the samples will give you a lot of insight that you would otherwise miss.

You may want to look at traditional undergraduate college physics textbooks, such as the standard Halliday and Resnick text. These won't go into fully 3D rigid body dynamics, and tend to focus on linearized problems (so be careful to understand all of the assumptions/constraints put forth for any derivation----which limit their usefulness for general simulation). But they will have a very solid, clearly written description of the fundamentals of mechanics, with some simple real-world examples. These can set the stage for reading more advanced material, dealing with nonlinear physics and numerical simulation.

Fundamentals of Physics

Buying this monster of a book new, in hardcover, will be costly. But, its been around for decades and the underlying material hasn't changed all that much. You should have no problem finding a usable used copy for quite cheap (cheaper than Amazon's used price), at many a used bookstore.

Graham

To supplement Halliday and Resnick, I would suggest an undergraduate level classical dynamics text such as Classical Dynamics by Marion and Thorton. And only then, once you grasp this material, go after Goldstein's Classical Mechanics text.

I have my doubts as to how much classical mechanics, classical dynamics, lagrangian and hamiltonian formalism, etc really help game developers with physics. The physics that comes up in game development has way too many explicit time-dependencies for that I think.

Rather, once you finish with fundamentals of mechanics (halliday, resnick, etc) I would think a good book on differential equations and numerical methods would be greatly more helpful.

Thank you for all of the suggestions. I added several of these books to my Amazon.com wishlist. I think I may look into taking a few physics courses at a local college. I am taking the Physics for Game Developers at the GameInstitute right now, but it is such a complex topic that I don't feel like I am getting it. I probably need to get some hands experience.

Quote:

Original post by adam23 I am looking for a really good book on Physics for video games. I have Physics for Game Developers, which contains a lot of useful information, but I would like something easier to read and something that contains collision detection techniques. The reason I say easier to read is because Physics for Game Develpers feels like I'm reading a textbook, which doesn't give enough examples. I like knowing how equations are derived, but then give an example of how to use it using a real life problem not just letters. Thanks in advance :)

Collision detection techniques are located inside books about 3D math, and on the Internet. Freely accessible pages often has the most recent information.

Majority of collision detection techniques are just if "a" <= "b" if "b" isn't degenerated. Easy to derive if you'd look at the softsurfer.net and learn basic 3D geometry principles. The more important thing is don't read just a book, try to implement some simple testing/demonstration programs to properly learn correct implementation principles.

What real life problem do you need? Try to imagine things. For example do you remember how Sonic looked at that car he passed, it started to brake heavily, then the road ended.

It's true that if you'd search this forum for word integration, it will show significantly more information than that book. Then again it's not entirely bad if you'd search the web for additional info.

For a more practical tutorial, including lots of example code, check out the vertlett tutorial at gamesutra. It's wrote by the author of the physics engine for the Hitman series, so the guy knows his stuff.
Based upon it I created a pretty nice physics system, and I had zero physics knowledge beforehand, so it's good for a beginner.