Physics Mini-Course Complete! - Game Dev Weekly

This week I finished up the Physics mini-course on Udemy by Ben Tristem and got started on the preparation course for the official Unity certification program, but more on that in next weeks blog post.

Spending the last week and a half in physics reminded me about how much I hated physics at the university, I still dislike it but in the context of games and seeing the results in real-time in Unity it's not quite as bad. I'm not kidding when I say I hated it, in fact I have to retake it due to not doing well enough the first time around which to this day is probably one of my greatest shames. However by learning to really buckle down, focus, and work through it that class was eventually completed. Thankfully the experience in this Udemy course was nothing like that.

This course focused on created physics simulations without using Unity's built in physics systems, the ultimate goal was to create a system that was in many ways more realistic despite adding a bit of complexity. In real situations I think I would just use the built in physics system for most situations, but it was nice knowing that extending it wasn't a hard task.

While last week's focus was gravity and motion, this week was a focus on rotation and friction. It turned out that rotation was only a small modification of the rules governing motion...

With no net torque, angular velocity remains constant.
Torque = inertia tensor * angular acceleration
Every torque has an equal and opposite torque.

As you can see from the attached gif however, it's still important to remember even more basic rules such as "if something is in the Update method make sure you account for frame-rate!"

Now that I have started a bit into the certification course I hope to complete it by 10/13's blog post with a part way through update on 10/6, unless I go overboard and rush to get it done by 10/6 but I'm trying to stop pushing so hard.