Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

This book is really great for beginning. All programs are available on this page in upper left section EXAMPLE link.

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

Excellent book. The author made physics and c++ very straightforward given my background is math/stats and visual basic.

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

There is a lot of good information in here. Anyone who has the requisite physics to understand the book could probably do a lot of this stuff already, particularly the particle mechanics, but it's good to have some of these things derived for you, laid out and put together for clarity and ease of use.

Like some others, I was disappointed to find that the example code uses Windows APIs. True, it doesn't affect the physics code, which is all on its own. But it keeps anyone but a Windows user from running and messing with the downloaded examples. This means that I have to program the example from the ground up just to see it running under Linux.

To the person who says that Runge-Kutta isn't mentioned: Check pages 181-182.

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

Be really careful buying this book. Although its contents cover pretty nice bunch of things we would like to know more about, the book style is VERY SIMPLE and rather addressed to people from elementary school. Moreover, the Author is inconsequent in many things, for example, he uses very inconsistent name's convention, for instance: velocity is defined as a vector sometimes, but sometimes not (which is a bug for me) and result is one - mess in the book.

I would not disqualify this book, but it is definitely not for people who have some physics background. Better take your old school books and read them again if you want to do something really working.

Too bad also that the Author did not cover really interesting topic like Runge-Kutta fourth order integration method.

Five stars - in contrary - for O'Reilly's for publishing the samples rather than putting them on CD. It definitely lowers the book price, very good move.

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

Actually, I would give this book 3.5 critters. I do have the math and physics background to follow the author. A more comprehensive book on mechanics is

"Vector Mechanics for Engineers" by Beer and Johnson. Io, or moment of inertia, is explained in great length as are all of the authors topics and much more.

What would be really nice if all of the programs were made available, either with an accompanying CD or at the web-site. For no better reason, than to show how the program works. If the author doesn't explain what is left out, I have to figure it out. I would rather be experimenting with the code. This is sort of like bying a mini-van, without an engine. Sure you have a vehical that can haul half of a softball team, but until you get the engine, nobody plays any ball.

I'm not a Mac guy, but I agree with their gripe and then some. It should be clearly stated which language and platforms this code is intended for.

In summary, the basic algorithms are good if you understand mechanics. The code needs to be more verbosely documented. And why not have all the code available?

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

A wonderful book. Well layed out, a simple and practical framework of basic principals which provide a sufficient foundation for most readers to apply real-world behaviours to just about any simulated event.

The techniques and formulas provided in this book are applicable to any platform. Any reader who complains about not being able to cut/paste and compile the sample initialization code into their OpenGL application is missing the point.

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

I'm thrilled with this book. It covers the topics I want it to cover and I'm particularly glad I didn't have to pay for paper that covers too much introductory information.

The appendicies cover just enough background information to shake the rust off but isn't a complete lesson on basic math. I think more books should be written like this.

The examples are clear and easy to understand and the text is in the classic O'Reilly quality: the meat without the fluff. The $40 price point is an excellent value. Bravo! More like this please!

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

I find this book a great resource for the game developer. As stated in another review, this book really covers mechanics, and not many other fields of physics. Fortunately, the book covers exactly what I purchased it for. I've had to brush up quite a bit on my rusty math skills, but I think that could be considered an occupational hazard.

While I sometimes write for Windows, most of my game coding is actually done on another platform, yet I did not find the Windows-based C code included to be a hinderance. If anything, through translating it to my platform, I found I understood it better than if I had just "thrown it in" someplace.

I was searching for a book with just this information, and just this depth about two years ago, and could find nothing close in my research. Overall, an excellent book! Now, if only there were a "Collision Detection for Game Developers" (hint,hint}

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

Unfortunately, this book appears to only cover mechanics, not physics. Where, for example, is the subscience of optics (reflections, refractions of light) for game developers covered?

The boastful title is exaggerated.

Comments about oreilly Physics for Game Developers:

Physics for Game Developers strikes a perfect balance between theory and practical examples. The chapters explaining how to simulate projectile, plane, boat, hovercraft, and car were extremely helpful applications of the theory introduced in previous chapters. I rarely felt that there was any sort of 'gap' between theory and application--nearly every parameter and equation used in the applications was at some point in the text derived (very readably) from fundamental principles of mechanics. It would have been nice to see a more thorough discussion of collision detection. While collision detection methods aren't physics, accurate and numerically robust collision detection is and essential part of any game that uses a physics engine.

The code examples are easy to read. I don't think that the fact that they're written to use Direct3D should keep anyone from buying this book. It will prevent you from running the examples without modification, but no developer even slightly familiar with 3D graphics should have trouble translating them to their preferred OS and 3D API. And only the graphics code is platform specific--the actual simulation code is completely portable.