| Submitted by , posted on 06 February 2003 |

Image Description, by Here's a screenshot from a little game I've been working on in my spare time. I recently finished it and released it as a shareware game. When I started working on it, I wanting to build a fairly full featured physics engine. The game idea came later. Now that it's done I don't know if I'd really call it full featured. It supports spheres, boxes, and polys and all their combinations. It does do friction calculations for object to object and object to terrain collisions. And it does have a nice constraint system that works between any two types of physics objects. One of the things I did that I would definitely recommend to others is to keep your physics system on a separate update loop from your game logic and render calls. Also, keep the separation of wall time and simulation time separate and distinct.
The engine I wrote for this game can support about fifty to one hundred objects bouncing around on a 1GHz machine. But, I'm sure I could squeeze a lot more out of it - I didn't get around to doing many low level optimizations since it ran fast enough for my game right off the bat.
One of the things that worked really well graphically (which is also shown in this image) is the use of a mirror effect to end the game's relatively small worlds. It fills up the unused screen real estate with something interesting to look at.
I also had an interesting experience releasing a shareware game. I'd love to discuss it with any other shareware game authors out there. For more information or just to check out the demo, go to. http://www.evertt.com
Jeff Evertt

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