#VideoGames#GameEngines#Physics#SImulation: "A key part of many game engines is the physics engine, which mathematically models everything we’ve learned about the physical world. A strong wind can be simulated using velocity. An animated bubble might take into account surface tension. Last year, Epic released Lego Fortnite, a family-friendly mode in which players can build—and destroy with dynamite—their own Lego constructions. The game is cartoonish, but its mechanics are grounded in reality. “When the building falls, everybody knows what that’s supposed to look like,” Saxs Persson, an executive at Epic, told me. “It looks good because they got the mass right.
They got the collision volumes right. They got the gravity right. They got friction, which is really hard. They got wind, terrain. All of it has to be perfect.” Even the precise tension of pulling Legos apart, a common muscle memory, has been simulated. “It’s all math,” he said.
Yet certain things remain hard to simulate. There are multiple types of water renderers—an ocean demands a kind of simulation different from that of a river or a swimming pool—but buoyancy is challenging, as are waves and currents."
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