Summary

We covered a lot of ground in this book. I want to take a minute and reflect on all the topics we covered, and the learning that is still ahead.

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 covered the basics of Linear Algebra. Having this mathematical foundation is central to writing a physics engine!

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 covered what two-dimensional primitives are and how to detect intersections between them.

Chapters 8, 9, and 10 covered what three-dimensional primitives are and the most efficient way to determine intersections between them.

Chapters 11, 12, and 13 covered meshes, scenes, and scene organization. These skills become important as you construct larger and more elaborate scenes.

Finally, chapters 14, 15, and 16 covered physics. Throughout these three chapters, we built a very basic physics engine. Even though the engine is basic, we did some interesting things with it. We implemented particle physics, rigid body physics, and soft body physics (cloth), all in the same engine.

In the appendix, you were given several book and open source game engine references. Reading the source code of open source engines is very important. Topics covered in books and academic papers are often easier to understand when you can go through the code that is executing. I highly encourage for the first resource be reading through the Box2D Lite source code after reading this book.