Game Physics Pearls

Implementing physical simulations for real-time games is a complex task that requires a solid understanding of a wide range of concepts from the fields of mathematics, physics, and software engineering. This book is a gems-like collection of practical articles in the area of game physics. Each provides hands-on detail that can be used in practical

Physics is really important to game programmers who need to know how to add physical realism to their games. They need to take into account the laws of physics when creating a simulation or game engine, particularly in 3D computer graphics, for the purpose of making the effects appear more real to the observer or player.The game engine ne

Written by a pioneer of game development in academia, Introduction to Game Physics with Box2D covers the theory and practice of 2D game physics in a relaxed and entertaining yet instructional style. It offers a cohesive treatment of the topics and code involved in programming the physics for 2D video games. Focusing on writing elementary game physics code, the first half of the book helps you grasp the challenges of programming game physics from scratch, without libraries or outside help. It examines the mathematical foundation of game physics and illustrates how it is applied in practice through coding examples. The second half of the book shows you how to use Box2D, a popular open source 2D game physics engine. A companion website provides supplementary material, including source code and videos. This book helps you become a capable 2D game physics programmer through its presentation of both the theory and applications of 2D game physics. After reading the book and experimenting with the code samples, you will understand the basics of 2D game physics and know how to use Box2D to make a 2D physics-based game.

Discover over 100 easy-to-follow recipes to help you implement efficient game physics and collision detection in your games About This Book 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 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. 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 In Detail 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! Style and approach Gain the necessary skills needed to build a Physics engine for your games through practical recipes, in an easy-to-read manner. Every topic explained in the book has clear, easy to understand code accompanying it.

CD ROM contains a snapshot of the full distribution of source code, documentation and supporting materials located at the Magic Software Inc. website. --Inside cover.

GPU Computing Gems, Jade Edition, offers hands-on, proven techniques for general purpose GPU programming based on the successful application experiences of leading researchers and developers. One of few resources available that distills the best practices of the community of CUDA programmers, this second edition contains 100% new material of interest across industry, including finance, medicine, imaging, engineering, gaming, environmental science, and green computing. It covers new tools and frameworks for productive GPU computing application development and provides immediate benefit to researchers developing improved programming environments for GPUs. Divided into five sections, this book explains how GPU execution is achieved with algorithm implementation techniques and approaches to data structure layout. More specifically, it considers three general requirements: high level of parallelism, coherent memory access by threads within warps, and coherent control flow within warps. Chapters explore topics such as accelerating database searches; how to leverage the Fermi GPU architecture to further accelerate prefix operations; and GPU implementation of hash tables. There are also discussions on the state of GPU computing in interactive physics and artificial intelligence; programming tools and techniques for GPU computing; and the edge and node parallelism approach for computing graph centrality metrics. In addition, the book proposes an alternative approach that balances computation regardless of node degree variance. Software engineers, programmers, hardware engineers, and advanced students will find this book extremely useful. This second volume of GPU Computing Gems offers 100% new material of interest across industry, including finance, medicine, imaging, engineering, gaming, environmental science, green computing, and more Covers new tools and frameworks for productive GPU computing application development and offers immediate benefit to researchers developing improved programming environments for GPUs Even more hands-on, proven techniques demonstrating how general purpose GPU computing is changing scientific research Distills the best practices of the community of CUDA programmers; each chapter provides insights and ideas as well as 'hands on' skills applicable to a variety of fields

Problems in theoretical physics often lead to paradoxical answers; yet closer reasoning and a more complete analysis invariably lead to the resolution of the paradox and to a deeper understanding of the physics involved. Drawing primarily from his own experience and that of his collaborators, Sir Rudolf Peierls selects examples of such "surprises" from a wide range of physical theory, from quantum mechanical scattering theory to the theory of relativity, from irreversibility in statistical mechanics to the behavior of electrons in solids. By studying such surprises and learning what kind of possibilities to look for, he suggests, scientists may be able to avoid errors in future problems. In some cases the surprise is that the outcome of a calculation is contrary to what physical intuition seems to demand. In other instances an approximation that looks convincing turns out to be unjustified, or one that looks unreasonable turns out to be adequate. Professor Peierls does not suggest, however, that theoretical physics is a hazardous game in which one can never foresee the surprises a detailed calculation might reveal. Rather, he contends, all the surprises discussed have rational explanations, most of which are very simple, at least in principle. This book is based on the author's lectures at the University of Washington in the spring of 1977 and at the Institut de Physique Nucleaire, University de Paris-Sud, Orsay, during the winter of 1977-1978.

Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems explores the impact of intelligent tutoring system design on education and training. Specifically, this volume examines “Instructional Management” techniques, strategies and tactics, and identifies best practices, emerging concepts and future needs to promote efficient and effective adaptive tutoring solutions. Design recommendations include current, projected, and emerging capabilities within the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT), an open source, modular, service-oriented architecture developed to promote simplified authoring, reuse, standardization, automated instructional management and analysis of tutoring technologies.