Monday, September 1, 2008

Physics - long over due

Ok, last month was really tough ( I took data structures and "ethics and psychology" ) so I have not had much time to sleep or breath let alone post anything on the blog; but I will try to catch up.

So physics, physics was much more advanced than I had thought it would be, we covered the basics first off: velocity, acceleration and friction. We used Euler method for simple velocity and acceleration calculations, then the Verlet Method for a good balance of accuracy and computational speed, then Runge Kutta 4 or just RK4 for the most precise calculation of velocity and acceleration. The rest of the class was filled mostly with calculating the impulsive forces after a collision, and calculating the angular velocity and acceleration taking the impulse and inertia of the object into consideration.

We did several labs in this class to demonstrate the techniques and they were a bit more challenging the Linear algebra but overall the class is fairly easy to pass. However, there is a ton, I mean a whole exact English measurement of a ton, of notes that you "could" take if you are so inclined (which not many are) on how to put some awesome physics in your game. We got into some really advanced topics some of which you would not get to till graduate level courses in a typical university. All of what we learned is geared to 3D real time "discrete" physics, which, according to our instructor and math guru Bahin, you will not find any courses for in more than a hand full of places across the globe. We learned physics but not the typical physics, we learned physics and how to implement it in real time. Not something a normal physics major would ever have to concern themselves with.

So the overall the class is very valuable, but you have to do more than just the course work to get everything out of this class.

Ok on to Data Structures and Psychology

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Dude,
I am looking forward to join the game dev program next april and I was wondering if I could get a peekof how their tests look like. I have been going through your posts and and through some other forums and I realise that it is really tough-maths and physics. I am not so bad in Maths but was wondering how much I need to prepare before and if you could show some sample tests or questions that would be orsome.
Thanks