Why Don’t Things Fall Up? Making Use of Physics Engines

When film director Stephen Spielberg first announced he would be collaborating on the development of a game for the Wii console, many people were intrigued as to what sort of storytelling extravaganza they might be treated too… At the time, I’m not sure many of the would have anticipated anything like the physics based puzzle game Boom Blox in which the aim is to knock stacks of blocks (“blox”?!) down as efficiently as possible!

(If you’re creatively minded, there’s also a “create” editor in Boom Blox that allows you create your own levels.)

So why does everything fall the way it does in Boom Blox? Physics…

In the post Gravity Waves, I mention three games based around simulated physics – Newtoon, Launchball (a browser based physics puzzle game, also with its own level creation tool) and Phun. In each case, the idea is to manipulate or create objects in the game world and then let physics – gravity, elasticity, and so on – have its way…

Crayon Physics is another construction-led physics game (in many respects reminiscent of Phun) in that the idea is to… well, watch the following video clip, and you decide…

How would you describe Crayon Physics?

Physics games are games that involve the player directly and purposefully engaging with the physics of the game world. But for many games, whether they are 2D Pacman like arcade games, or 3D games set in realistic simulated real world settings, physics still plays a part. Why can’t Pacman walk through a wall, for example? And why do cars crash just the way they do in many a 3D racing game? Physics, that’s why…

According to the presentation shown above (or otherwise), what, in the context of game physics, are:

• “rigid bodies”;
• “soft bodies”;
• “ragdolls”.

In many games, a physics engine is used to manage the behaviour of both small and large objects alike according to set of mathematical equations that model the physics – that is, the physical behaviour – of the the objects. This behaviour extends from describing how objects move, or fall, to how they swerve round each other, and what happens when collide: people generally can’t walk through walls, for example, but neither do they tend to break, or shatter, or crumple…

The mathematics involved in calculating game physics can be very computationally expensive and difficult to programme, particularly as simulations get more realistic and require the behaviour of ever increasing numbers of particles to be modeled. Many games make use of licensed physics engines that have been developed by specialist companies or the larger game developers, which means that they can benefit from complex simulations without the need to programme that behaviour in from scratch.

Read the Gamasutra article Outsourcing Reality: Integrating a Commercial Physics Engine. If physics is (not yet) your thing, the following may help you in your reading:

• Integration Basics: Geometry Export: what basic shapes is the physics engine likely to undertsand?
• Time Management: what are ‘game time’, ‘frame time’ and ‘simulation time’ and how do they relate to each other?
• Applying Forces: in what three ways can an object be compelled to move in a physical model?
• Spatial Queries: in what ways might the physics engine allow ‘logical statements’ to be made about the interaction of different characters in the game world?
• Integrating Keyframed Motion: although many game objects move in the way they do because of physics, and the forces applied to them, some objects may have been animated as keyframes – that is, they have been drawn to move in a single particular way and as such will not respond to any forces applied to them, although they may exert forces on objects they are in contact with…
• Player Control Strategies: to simplify collision detection, a simple, regularly shaped ‘bounding box’ or ‘capsule’ is often drawn around game and player characters. This box is then used as the basis for collision detection.

  What are the ‘three fundamental approaches’ to controlling how the player character actually moves? How does the choice of approach affect the ‘usability’ of the game in terms of how easy the character is to control?

Plausible – and well modeled – game physics can make a significant difference to the feel of game, both from a usability (ease of control) point of view, as well as a degree of faithfulness point of view (for example, some racing games pride themselves on how realistic the physical behaviour of the cars is).

Getting to grips with game physics can also be a great way of learning about real physics – and the maths used to describe it – because it provides a real context for using the equations. If you would like to learn more about game physics, a good place to start is with these OpenLearn videos on differential equations…

To learn more about physics games, visit the Fun-Motion physics games blog. As well as a comprehensive listing of physics related ‘games’, it also includes a wide range of posts and video clips relating to many issues of game physics.