Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Throughout this chapter, I
ve described physics in general and one SDK in particular
from Bullet
(www.bulletphysics.com).
There are certainly others:
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physics engine, but expensive and likely out of reach for small game companies
or individuals.
cial grade physics engine owned by NVidia and optimized for use with GPU-
based physics. A software driver is also available.
able game engine within reach of budget games.
can use for free.
and newer versions are commercially licensable and within reach of budget games.
The SDKs are developed so rapidly that an exhaustive review of each of them in this
book would quickly become stale. I suggest you go to their websites, check out the
developer forums and licensing terms, and do a little surfing for others. New ones
come out all the time.
Whatever you do, don
t think for a minute that you can plug in one of these physics
systems in a day or two and completely change the feel of your game. Integrating this
technology is much more than making it link and getting collision events sent
around. You have to write a lot of code to have your game react to what the physics
system does to your dynamic objects and the events it detects. That, my young Feyn-
man, is an amazing amount of work, and you shouldn
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t underestimate it.
Super Bouncy Barrels
I think I mentioned before that Thief: Deadly Shadows used the Havok Physics
SDK. Thief
t really have a good dynamics
simulation, and Havok seemed to be pretty cool. For the longest time, the
correct impulses created by kinematic animation, such as characters bumping
into things, were drastically exaggerated. These huge impulses would send
huge barrels and crates spinning across the map just by touching them, and
while it was funny at first, after a few weeks everyone just wanted things to
work. The problem was that the two physics programmers were so busy wiring
everything else that they postponed this issue to focus on bigger problems.
Until, of course, an Eidos executive saw a barrel
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s version of Unreal, Warfare 2.5, didn
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launch into orbit during a
