Cyclone Game Engine Development: 87.) Cyclone Game Engine Character Physics Controller Part 2

Because of limited time, the design and creation of 3D models was placed on hold to focus on getting the physics collision working with low-poly models properly. I went back and utilized the Stage 1 scene from the Robot Game Starter Kit for testing purposes. It not only provided me with rapid results and made me very happy, but gave me room to further expand and modify the scene in the future for improving the graphics. I plan to add particle effects, shaders and more models.

I used JigLibX as the physics engine which is one of the favored open-source physics engines for physics and collision detection. Using JigLibX was a one of the best decisions about this project because it allowed me to focus more on gameplay, instead of spending time on creating my own physics library. JigLibX is a physics engine written in C# using Microsoft's XNA framework. It is based off the physics engine JigLib and I am currently porting it to MonoGame and further expanding it. Having a collision system and a rigid body physics engine makes JigLibX one of the favored free open-source physics engines designed for use with XNA.

With my Ai obstacle-avoidance and steering behaviors sample working recently, I might expand this map to create an arcade style wave based survival game prototype starting out. The player will fight off hordes of various enemies and creatures to rack up a large kill count and points. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself but I think this prototype will hold a lot of potential.

I plan on implementing Parallax Occlusion Mapping to make the textures pop out and add depth to the textures so that they don't appear too flat.

I might implement Deferred Rendering which will allow the game engine to render a huge number of dynamic lights very efficiently.

I plan to add a real-time reflection shader to the car's vehicle body.

Each game object is represented in the physics engine by a simplified mesh called a collision skin. The collision skins are often rough estimations of the geometry of the game object in order to make simulation faster. The chassis if this car object for example is actually composed of two boxes, one large for the bottom of the model and a smaller box for the top. Rigid body physics is the part of physics that deals with the motion of rigid bodies. Rigid body simulations are fast and easy to calculate relative to other methods of simulating physics.

This makes it very useful in game development where performance plays an important role when trying to create a realistic playing experience. Rigid body physics can simulate movement and rotation in three dimensions and allows a body to have properties like mass, friction, torque, velocity etc. In a rigid body physics simulation, all objects are non-deformable. This means that an object can never be squeezed or bent regardless of what forces are applied to them.