Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
maintained and has been used in many games and even some Dreamworks
movies. The engine and the website are both useful resources.
Collision detection is a large portion of any physics engine, both in terms
of lines of code and CPU time consumed. Unfortunately, it's di
cult to say
“a little” about collision detection, and we haven't had the space to do it
justice in this topic. Ericson's Real-Time Collision Detection [18] is our top
recommendation, but van den Bergen's text [70] is also useful. A significant
amount of material on collision detection material can be found in Eberly's
topics on physics engines [17] and geometric tools for games [59].
Many of the mathematical problems that arise in computer simulation
fall under the broad category of scientific computing. (Older names for this
same basic subject area are “applied mathematics” and “numerical analy-
sis.”) Numerical Recipes in C [56] is a classic work for engineers, with clear
explanations and a large toolkit of source code. Several good textbooks ex-
ist on the subject; we can recommend Scientific Computing by Heath [32].
Strang's textbook [67] has the compelling feature that an entire course of
accompanying lectures are available free from MIT OpenCourseWare at
ocw.mit.edu.
Chris Hecker has a collection of resources for real-time physics at
12.8
Exercises
(Answers on page 784.)
1. In a cartoon universe, a sailboat can be propelled by placing a fan in the
sailboat and pointing it at the sail. Explain why this doesn't work in the
real world, by using Newton's laws.
2. A boy and a girl are playing tug of war. The girl begins to win. Name
all of the important forces involved, and describe which force imbalance is
causing the girl to begin winning.
3. True or false: Lighter objects fall faster than heavier ones because the force
of gravity is a constant near Earth's surface.
4. The International Space Station orbits Earth at approximately 340 km
above Earth's surface at a speed of approximately 27,740 km/hr. (The
orbit is actually elliptical, but ignore that for now.) What is the acceleration
caused by Earth's gravity in this “zero gravity” environment? Also, if the
Earth's gravity still has a significant effect, why are astronauts in the space
station “weightless”? (
Note:
see also Exercise 11.12.)
5. A concrete block is placed on a wooden ramp. According to
Table 12.1,
what is the critical angle of inclination of the ramp at which the block will
begin to slide? If we conducted the experiment on the moon, would the
critical angle increase, decrease, or stay the same?
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