Hi readers!
In this post, I’m going to discuss the biggest help in creating my physics engine out of all my research, and why it was so effective at teaching the concepts of physics engines. Check out the link’s page if you want to check it out for yourself.

Motivation

This tutorial is great at showing exactly why the information it gives you is useful for a physics engine and it doesn’t wait too much time before getting into exactly what needs to be. For a reader who was searching around and finding really vague, theoretical guides and tutorials this was a breath of fresh air, and really help a reader stay engaged and interested in learning more. Furthermore, alongside the equations and conceptual explanations we are given helpful code snippets that we can run on our own computers and edit so we we can actually see how its implemented as we’re reading. There’s enough information that you can see in general hwo it could work, but not so much that you end up just copying and not learning anything.

Images

The entire tutorial is surrounded by extremely helpful and eye-catching images and schematics that helpfully illustrate whatever point is being made. Some of the concepts explained are unintuitive and complex, so having images to clarify what is happening is very useful. They also do a good job of making the website look professional and establish ethos so that the reader trusts what the tutorial has to say.

Information Layout

Finally what I found most unique and interesting about this tutorial was how cleverly the information was presented and laid out. First off the tutorial is in three sections, Dynamics, Collision Detection, and Constrained Simulation aka Collision resolution. This is smart because not only are these components usually implemented separately, so wouldn’t need to be grouped together, but are ordered in increasing order of complexity. This makes sense because someone just wanting to learn how movement works wouldn’t have to scroll past information about collisions, and someone who wanted to make a full physics engine get the information in easily digestible chunks, and not all at once. This principle is also applied within each section as well with a basic version of the concept being explained initially, and it getting more advanced as you read further, until the end where it is very complex. Once again this makes the tutorial appeal to many people as those looking to make physics engines of all levels of complexity can learn a lot here.